Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides. Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly…

President-elect Joe Biden named his national security team last week. Antony Blinken will be nominated for secretary of state; Jake Sullivan for national security adviser; Avril Haines for director of national intelligence; and Alejandro Mayorkas for secretary of homeland security. All but Sullivan will require Senate confirmation. How that goes depends…

October 28, 2020   The Honorable Donald Trump Office of the President of the United States The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C. 20006  Re:  Renewal of U.S. Business Licenses to Protect Assets and Operations in Venezuela  Dear Mr. President:   Over the past four years, your administration…

After Israel's resounding victory over the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in 1967, the Jewish state again offered the Arab world peace in exchange for recognition. And it was again rebuffed. Instead, the Arab League convened in Khartoum to formulate a consensus response that became known as "The 3 Noes" – no recognition…

Almost daily, Greek and Turkish aircraft and ships fight mock battles over disputed oil and gas rights in the eastern Mediterranean. Since the loss of much of the Christian Balkans to the Ottomans in the 15th century, Greece and what would later become modern Turkey have been rivals, outright enemies and often at war. Mutual NATO membership and shared…

It took approximately 20 seconds for former Secretary of State John Kerry to drop the first flagrant lie in his Democratic National Convention speech on Tuesday, when he claimed that the Obama administration's so-called Iran deal had "eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon." It didn't get any better from there. Kerry knows…

President Trump recently ordered a 12,000-troop reduction in American military personnel stationed in Germany. That leaves about 24,000 American soldiers still in the country. A little more than half of the troops being withdrawn will return home. The rest will be redeployed to other NATO member nations such as Belgium, Italy, and perhaps Baltic and…

The world was a dangerous place before – and will be after – the coronavirus pandemic. While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection's origins, nature and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary, news. Many Americans are irate at China for its dishonest and…

The depraved totalitarians, nefarious barbarians, two-bit gangsters, odious scoundrels and bigoted scum who run the United Nations recently set up a new "database" to help anti-Semites around the world target Jewish businesses in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria – businesses that not only offer economic opportunities…

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…

It's unlikely that Donald Trump's new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan will succeed. Yet, it's the best of any recent offerings because it dispels poisonous fictions that have held back negotiations for decades. The reality is that there will never be a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel, since such a policy would destroy the Jewish character…

Whether by accident or by deliberate osmosis, Israel and the U.S. have adopted similar solutions to their existential problems. Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. In response, Israel planned…

After losing its top strategist, military commander and arch-terrorist, Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian theocracy is weighing responses. One, Iran can quiet down and cease military provocations. After attacking tankers off its coast, destroying an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia, shooting down a U.S. drone and being responsible for the killing and wounding…

Democrats are trying to impeach President Donald Trump for holding up military aid to Ukraine after Congress voted to provide it. Trump put a hold on the aid on July 18, and it wasn't released until Sept. 11. What the Dems and the media are not telling you is that Trump also delayed aid to Pakistan, Gaza, three central American countries and 10 aid…

There are about 5,000 members of the U.S. military, mostly airmen, stationed at the huge, strategically located air base in Incirlik, Turkey, northwest of the Syrian border. The American forces at Incirlik are also the custodians of about 50 B61 nuclear bombs. Data on these weapons is classified, but at their maximum yield each is 10 times more powerful…

If you want to stop Donald Trump from making unilateral decisions regarding war and peace, then stop letting all presidents make unilateral decisions about war and peace. It's really quite simple. Trump can abruptly pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria because Congress, having abdicated its foreign policy responsibilities long ago, has no leverage…

Year after year, Congress votes to spend tens of billions of dollars on foreign aid. It's money down a rat hole. Congress should take a page from Pope Francis. On Friday, Pope Francis blamed foreign aid for corruption and destitution in Mozambique, a sub-Saharan country where he was preaching to thousands in an outdoor arena. Despite the country's…

President Donald Trump got slammed by all sides — Democrats, the media and European politicians — for suddenly escalating economic war with China on Friday. But for Americans who have lost a family member or friend to the Chinese-made street drug fentanyl, Trump's harsh pivot is the right move. He hiked tariffs on Chinese goods…

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the "Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted…

President Trump recently ordered and then called off a retaliatory strike against Iran for destroying a U.S. surveillance drone. The U.S. asserts that the drone was operating in international space. Iran claims it was in Iranian airspace. Antiwar critics of Trump's Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast him as a weak, vacillating leader afraid…

In May 2018, the Donald Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal. The U.S. then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration also hoped a strapped Iran would become less…

Critics call President Donald Trump a diplomatic wrecking ball, while his supporters admiringly watch him take on foreign policy challenges that previous presidents chose to ignore or left to diplomatic "experts." Who's right? This week, the rubber meets the road. Trump's highly personal approach to negotiating with foreign powers &…

This deserves to be front-page news.  Amid the constant headlines announcing the latest manifestation of a roaring U.S. economy, however, not to mention ceaseless media pearl-clutching over everything down to President Trump's morning breakfast selections, it hasn't received the attention and celebration that it merits.  Simply put, Trump…

What can Democrat Chuck Schumer, Republican Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump agree on? Almost nothing, but they agree China is robbing America blind and has to be stopped. When the president slapped a punishing 25 percent tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods starting July 6, his least likely GOP ally, Senator Marco Rubio, applauded the…

Reaction to President Trump's summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has broken down along the usual Trump-anti-Trump divisions. The truth is, it will take a while before it's clear whether the summit achieved anything or not. But give the president credit for trying a new approach to an intractable problem. Trump had no electoral mandate…

Recently, President Trump tweeted, "I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!" The tweet was greeted with incredulity in some press circles. CNN called it "simply false." "The facts suggest the opposite," said the Washington Post. "Mostly false," declared Politifact…

As part of what he calls a "redesign" of the State Department, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has surveyed more than 35,000 State employees on the most fundamental questions facing the organization. And Tillerson—or, more accurately, a consulting firm hired by the secretary—has found that large blocs of State workers do not…

Globalists and Democrats shrieked last week when President Donald Trump proposed cutting American funding for the United Nations by 50 percent. The president dismisses the U.N. as a "waste of time and money." That's the least of it. U.S. taxpayers bankroll the U.N. with $10 billion a year. Our hard-earned money perpetuates an organization…

A key talking point in the theory that Donald Trump and the Russians conspired in the 2016 election is the allegation that last summer, during the Republican convention, the Trump campaign changed the GOP platform to weaken its stance on Russia's aggression in Ukraine. It's been cited by Democrats and anti-Trump pundits many, many times. The only…

Candidate Donald Trump set off a furious controversy when he said NATO countries should pay their "fair share" of mutual defense costs and, later, that the treaty organization was "obsolete" because not enough of its efforts were directed against radical Islamic terrorism. On Monday, Vice President Mike Pence took the Trump message…