By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
July 1, 2019
The Obama-loving, Trump-hating media could not wait to condemn Trump’s warm greeting of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his friendly meeting with Vladimir Putin during the G-20 meeting in Osaka, Japan. But the president took an even greater pounding for his meeting with Kim Jong Un in North Korea.
To begin with let’s make it clear that bin Salman, Putin and the pudgy guy with the funny haircut are all tyrants. But is that a reason for Trump to keep them at arm’s length? No, not at all.
Take the case of the Saudi crown prince. He has been accused of ordering the assassination in Turkey of occasional Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi who had lived in the U.S. in self-imposed exile from Saudi Arabia since 2017. Had Khashoggi been beheaded inside Saudi Arabia, it would have made only a blip in the media about the murder of a dissident journalist.
But the assassination took place in Turkey and that’s where Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist dictator, comes in to play. Erdogan is viewing for dominance of the Middle East with Saudi Arabia and Iran. So, he jumped at the opportunity to all but declare war on the Saudis. And the world-wide media took up his damnation of the Saudi crown prince because Khashoggi was a journalist.
Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the U.S. in the conflict with Iran. The Obama-loving, Trump-hating media would have us cut our ties with the Saudi kingdom because bin Salman ordered the assassination of Khashoggi. To the media, Trump giving bin Salman a warm greeting is akin to giving Adolf Hitler a loving hug.
Saudi Arabia has, to say the least, been an unusual ally. We should not forget or forgive the fact that members of the royal family bankrolled the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in NY and the attack on the Pentagon. But that was then and this is now. And the Saudis continue to establish and support Wahhabi madrassas in the U.S. which ate breeding grounds for Islamist terrorists.
But Saudi Arabia and the U.S. need each other in the conflict with Iran. That is why Trump was right in embracing bin Salman. And Trump did not bow down to the crown prince like Obama did so shamefully to the Saudi king in 2009.
And how about Putin? There is no doubt that he interfered in the 2016 election in a bid to help Trump win. And the Russians are our adversaries in the Middle East as strong supporters of the Assad regime in Syria and the Mullahs in Iran. Russia is one of the three most powerful nations in the world and is bristling with an array of nuclear weapons which are being continually modernized. Putin has also seized the Crimea and is supporting a rebellion in the Ukraine. Shame, shame on him.
The media and the Democrats want Trump to punch Putin in the eye every chance he gets because Vladimir tried to help defeat their beloved Hillary in 2016. But it is far better for Trump to have a warm relationship with the tyrant of a nuclear armed adversary than to blacken his eye as the media seems to want the president to do. Personal relationships between adversaries do count, and the relationship between Trump and Putin is an important one.
By the way, in our condemnation of Putin for interfering in our election, let’s not forget that Obama interfered in Israel’s election in a bid to oust his personal enemy Benjamin Netanyahu from the Israeli premiership.
That brings us to the pudgy guy with the funny haircut. Kim Jong Un is no joke! Most Western pundits predicted a very short rule for young Kim when he assumed power upon the death of his father in 2011. However, he soon became just as powerful as his grandfather and father before him. On top of that, Kim has acquired a number of nuclear weapons and has the intercontinental missiles to deliver them.
After some saber rattling between Trump and Kim, the two seem to have established a personal friendship with each other. That friendship may or not result in Kim scrapping his nuclear arsenal, but it is far better for the two to be friends than to threaten each other with mutual devastation.
Now Trump has become the first sitting U.S. president to step foot inside North Korea. Before Trump even got back home, the talking heads and their Obama-team foreign policy and intelligence wonks popped up all over the TV news channels condemning the President for giving Kim a tremendous propaganda a victory while getting nothing in return. The print media columnists who hate Trump did the same. There’s no doubt that Kim scored a tremendous propaganda victory when Trump stepped into the North and patted the pudgy guy with the funny haircut on the back. So what!
Obama spent his eight years in office trying to assure the leaders of the Islamic world that the U.S. was their friend and that it was not an adversary of the Palestinians. He had a standoffish relationship with Putin, he bowed down to King Abdullah, and he had absolutely no relationship with Kim Jong Un.
Trump on the other hand knows that it is very important to have a warm relationship with an ally like bin Salman and a friendship with enemies like Putin and Kim who have the ability to do us great harm. For that, Trump deserves the nation’s salute.
2 comments:
Well said.
Even FDR thought he could form a meaningful personal relationship with Stalin and do some good thru the force of his personality alone. (Mostly he was wrong, but that's what he thought.)
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