This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Last week, the House Intelligence Committee held a profoundly important hearing about Communist China’s ominous military build-up. Witnesses called particular attention to the danger posed by the Chinese seizure of one-time atolls all over the South China Sea that are now home to armed ports, airfields and missile installations designed to enforce Beijing’s claims to those strategic waters.

The Obama administration did nothing about this disastrous transformation – apart, that is, from allowing China’s warships to participate in sensitive multinational naval exercises known as Rimpac. It thereby effectively legitimated Beijing’s illegal and threatening activities, while affording the PRC opportunities to collect intelligence about, and develop techniques for defeating, U.S. and allied warships.

Thankfully, the Trump Pentagon has just ended this insanity, barring China from Rimpac 2018.  We can’t afford to treat the Chinese as friends when they are increasingly behaving as enemies.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Visiting South Korean president Moon Jae-in must have been disappointed that the headline from his meeting yesterday with President Trump is that the latter’s planned summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un might not occur. 

Ironically, that signal may actually have improved the prospects for such a summit. As with Mr. Trump’s earlier statement to the effect that he’d skip such a get-together if it wouldn’t advance North Korea’s denuclearization – and wouldn’t stay if it didn’t, the President is denying the North and South Korean leaders alike the sense that they have leverage over an American leader desperate for negotiations and a deal.

Trump’s clear readiness to deny Kim Jong-un the legitimacy, let alone the benefits, of such a summit with him will maximize the chances of a useful negotiation – and hopefully spare us the ignominy and risks of a counterproductive one.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

President Trump meets today with his South Korean counterpart to discuss the planned U.S.-North Korea summit next month.  Today’s conversation comes amidst harsh rhetoric from the North Koreans and evidence that their enabler, Communist China, is backsliding on its enforcement of sanctions on its client.

Mr. Trump’s guest will doubtless argue that he must make concessions up front.  After all, South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in has long advocated appeasement of his neighbor to the north.

Fortunately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out a very different approach yesterday with regard to North Korea’s strategic ally, Iran.  He made clear that, for negotiations to be of value they must address realistically and comprehensively the threats posed by such regimes.

President Trump deserves great credit for adopting this much-needed course-correction on Iran. Let’s apply a similarly robust approach to our no-less-dangerous foe, North Korea.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute. 

To hear Nicolas Maduro tell it, his dictatorship has been “reelected” to continue its devastating misrule of Venezuela.  That took some doing in the face of his catastrophic bankrupting of a once-prosperous country with the world’s largest oil reserves.

Mass starvation proved to be a pretty effective technique for suppressing the vote, however.  So were: jailing opposition candidates, vote rigging, regime dominance of the media, forcing millions into exile, bribing some voters and intimidating many others.  

The United States and others may impose still more sanctions on Maduro and his cronies.  But let’s face it.  The sheer magnitude of the crisis they have created in Venezuela requires an intervention by the Western hemisphere’s free nations – hopefully with the help of Venezuelan military personnel who love their country and want to end its suffering, not be party to, or responsible for, its perpetuation.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute. 

Ronald Reagan trenchantly warned that “every generation faces an existential threat to freedom.” Yesterday, America lost Richard Pipes, a man who played an outsized, yet largely unsung, role in helping President Reagan defeat that threat in his time: Soviet Communism. 

Professor Pipes was the world’s foremost historian of Russia, before, during and after Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik revolutionaries conquered that country.  He was also a driving force behind the Committee on the Present Danger and “Team B,” two groups that helped Mr. Reagan conceive and then execute a strategy for liberating Russians and the world of the Soviet blight.

A hearing in the House Intelligence Committee yesterday underscored the need for a similar strategy and effort to counter our time’s Communist threat to freedom: China.  It will be inspired by the leadership and success of Dr. Richard Pipes.

This is Frank Gaffney. 

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Amidst acrimonious U.S.-China trade talks in Washington today, the House Intelligence Committee will begin a series of hearings examining evidence of Communist China’s growing capacity to inflict mortal harm on this country and its interests – and Beijing’s intention to do so. 

Testimony today will focus on the extraordinary military build-up that is inexorably transforming China into a superpower in every sense of the word, capable of projecting power worldwide.

Future hearings are expected to examine how, even before Beijing has achieved such might, it is using a variety of non-military techniques – including influence operations, espionage, economic warfare, cyber attacks, overseas base construction and space control – to wage unrestricted warfare against us. 

Let’s hope the record House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes develops will spur us to adopt appropriate policy and programmatic actions to counter this Chinese threat before it’s too late.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute. 

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has begun throwing tantrums about the terms of his planned summit with President Donald Trump and the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula it’s supposed to advance.  Supposedly, he’s upset at joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises and National Security Advisor John Bolton.

The real reason the mask of Kim’s charm offensive is slipping surely has more to do with the orders this puppet has received from his master, Communist China’s dictator Xi Jinping. If not before, certainly from now on, Xi’s interest in perpetuating the threat posed to us by his client will determine what, if anything, comes of U.S.-North Korean negotiations.

If that’s the case, there is no point to our legitimating Kim Jong-un – let alone propping up his horrifically repressive regime.  And we are far better off knowing that now than discovering it later.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute. 

An Iranian government official has reportedly threatened to disclose which Western officials were bribed to achieve the fraudulent Obamabomb deal from which President Trump has wisely withdrawn the United States. Please do it.

Given the magnitude of the capitulation the West engaged in to get what former Secretary of State John Kerry once admitted was just a “political understanding,” it certainly is plausible that corruption was at work. That theory is only enhanced by the fact that $1.7 billion of the $150 billion that was given to Iran as part of this accord was surreptitiously paid in pallets of cash. 

It would be terrific if the mullahs would confirm whose palms they greased to secure a deal that not only gave them this windfall, but that actually gave Iran a legal path to the Bomb.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Hallelujah! President Trump has fulfilled his campaign promise to move the U.S. embassy to the capital of the State of Israel, Jerusalem.  He has thereby distinguished himself from his three predecessors, who campaigned on the same promise but, once in office, reneged.  

Mr. Trump has not only brought U.S. policy into alignment with the practice worldwide of locating our embassies in the host nation’s capital. He also called the bluff of Palestinians and others who warned of dire consequences if that were done in Jerusalem. 

Mideast expert Daniel Pipes has long argued that the Palestinians must come to terms with the reality of their defeat at Israel’s hands if there is to be a real peace between the two parties to the Mideast’s most intractable conflict.  The embassy move should, therefore, be seen as an inducement – not an impediment – to such a reconciliation. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute. 

President Trump has been persuaded that Gina Haspel should be the Central Intelligence Agency’s next Director.  Curiously, she is being strongly recommended for that job by men who have used the CIA and/or other elements of the intelligence community as Deep State weapons to try to destroy him, his campaign and his administration.

Perhaps that’s because Ms. Haspel helped one of them, Obama’s Director John Brennan, dismantle America’s human intelligence capabilities. Or perhaps they knew about her what the rest of us only learned during a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday:  The nominee testified that she would disobey a direct and lawful order from the President in the service of a “higher moral authority.” 

President Trump has tried entrusting national security organizations to insubordinate subordinates.  It’s proven to be a debilitating mistake, one that should not be repeated now at the CIA. 

This is Frank Gaffney.