Foreign Policy Update – USA Gov Policy

HONG KONG

Some of the worst news to come out of Asia since the emergence of the Wuhan pandemic is that Hong Kong’s autonomy appears to be coming to an abrupt end. The PRC is forcing the former British colony under a new national security law after bypassing the Hong Kong city legislature. In the 1997 declaration on Hong Kong, Beijing promised 50 years of independent rule as a semi-autonomous region. The governments of the United States, Australia, the UK and Canada issued a joint statement early Friday outlining their deep concern about the direct imposition of very harsh legislation which would curtail Hong Kong people’s liberties and erode Hong Kong’s autonomy.

President Trump on Friday also announced that he has directed his administration to review the full range of agreement since the territory is no longer separate from Beijing. During a press conference at the White House President Trump said he is directing the “administration to begin the process of eliminating policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment.” He also noted that he plans to revoke Hong Kong’s “preferential treatment as a separate customs and travel territory from the rest of China.”

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

The President announced that the US is pulling out of the World Health Organization (WHO) due to its mishandling of the Covid-19 virus pandemic. “We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and directing those funds to worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs,” Trump said in a statement from the White House. The President said that the WHO is under China’s control and failing to make the reforms within 30 days as requested by the US. Since WHO has refused to commit to making any reforms the US has stopped over $400 million in funding to the UN body.

In an interview this week Secretary of State Pompeo reminded people that the head of the World Health Organization in January said there was no human-to-human transmission of the virus and that there was little risk to the world. Pompeo added that at least since December the organization covered up the facts.

AUSTRALIA

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In a Sunday interview Secretary Pompeo was asked about Australia’s Victoria state, which is considering signing up as part of China’s BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) to earn billions from Beijing. Pompeo said that “every citizen of Australia should know that every one of those Belt and Road projects needs to be looked at incredibly closely…nearly each one of them has some cost to it. There’s often money loaned at concessional rates or conditions placed in the debt documents or government concessions that have to be made to the Chinese Communist Party in order to get those Belt and Road Initiative projects built. Those present real risk – real risk to the people in that region, real risk to your country – and frankly, they build up the capacity of the Chinese Communist Party to do harm in other ways as well.”

IRAN

This week Secretary Pompeo announced his decision to end the sanctions waiver covering all remaining JCPOA-originating nuclear projects in Iran, and also sanctioned two Iranian nuclear officials. The Iranian regime has “continued its nuclear brinkmanship by expanding proliferation-sensitive activities.” According to Brian Hook, Special Representative for Iran and Senior Advisor to Pompeo, this is a “complicated and multifaceted decision.”

On Wednesday, Pompeo terminated the nuclear waiver for the three remaining Iran nuclear-related projects. Hook pointed out that this includes the Arak reactor conversion, the provision of enriched uranium for the Tehran research reactor, and the export of Iran-spent and scrap research reactor fuel. The decision will take effect after a 60-day wind-down.

A senior State Department official said there were basically quite a larger number of projects that had begun under the JCPOA for which US waivers were in place, and those waivers have gradually been taken down one by one with this as the latest step in that progression.

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Saturday, she presents key updates on U.S. foreign policy from the State Department.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

America’s Terrorists in Training

When students, trained and equipped by Hamas and its financial backers, occupy campuses and threaten Jews and anyone who disagrees with them, it is neither a peaceful protest nor an exercise of free speech. It is a terrorist attack. Those students are not peaceful protestors. They are terrorists in training. It has been reported that many of those arrested are not even students, but individuals with ties to terrorists or anti-American activities. Their mission is not to protest, not to persuade, but to force institutions to bend to their will. Their targets are two-fold: First, in adherence to Hamas’ anti-Semitism, an attack on not just Israelis but Jews everywhere. Second, to weaken America’s influence in the crucial Middle Eastern region. But students do make up the majority of those involved. The blatant ignorance of so many protestors did not occur spontaneously or recently. Years of preparation went into it. Radical extremists infiltrated the educational system, from kindergarten through graduate school, for decades with the purpose of destroying pride in America and imposing a leftist agenda. On-air interviews of involved students have been revealing. Beyond chanted slogans, the students appear to have little knowledge of the actual dynamics of the Middle Eastern conflict that they appear to be so passionate about. What did come clearly though was a hair trigger response to condemn America and American institutions. That is the intentional result of many years of academic indoctrination. History has been taught through the prism of anti-Americanism. The extraordinary accomplishments in human freedom, the enormous good done by the nation have been obscured, while faults, even though they were corrected, are magnified. The Federalist notes that “America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display… many administrators claim to be stunned. Yet those of us who’ve been following the disastrous decline of American higher education have been warning for years about the inevitable. America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display. Years ago, America’s most prestigious academics made a conscious choice to elevate indoctrination over education. Training activists became their highest goal. Radical ideologies that began in Ethnic and Gender Studies swallowed once-proud social science and humanities disciplines. Their influence surged into administration, as new DEI offices redefined diversity, equity, and inclusion to mean their opposites, then spread their toxin throughout university operations. Wildly generous foreign money — with Qatar and China in the lead — anchored this noxious brew in place. The American Enterprise Institute found that “The 1619 Project and its companion resources have spread to thousands of schools (and counting) in all 50 states, priming students to reject America’s founding principles and even literally black out the Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, tales of politically radical K–12 instruction seem to break into the news almost daily.” The Discovery Institute notes that “ teacher unions, rather than modeling positive social behavior, instead promote indoctrination of students on partisan political viewpoints…. Today, leaders holding high government offices at the federal and state levels are quickly exploiting an underlying principle: The less educated our citizens are regarding civics, the more pliable they are to the acceptance of radical philosophies and agenda, and the more government power can grow. The end result will be a loss of the American Dream — life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Don’t believe this? Take a look at the citizens of today’s socialist and communist countries around the world. According to Ben Shapiro, “while advocates of Marxism today disown the Stalinists and the Maoists and the Castro regime and Venezuela and North Korea, all of those nations thought they were fulfilling Marx’s dream, too.” A Manhattan Institute review reports that “Results of a representative survey of more than 1,500 Americans aged 18 to 20 suggest that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology, together known as Critical Social Justice (CSJ), is widespread in American schools. Ninety-three percent of American 18- to 20-year-olds said that they had heard about at least one of eight CSJ concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex. Additionally, 90% of respondents had heard about at least one CRT concept and 74% about at least one radical gender concept. The campus protests are a window of what’s in store for the nation if the influence of anti-American educators continue.