De Facto border of Northern Syria-Rojava (Western Kurdistan)

Over explicit American protests, Turkey this week attacked an American-allied Kurdish-led militia in the northern Syrian town of Afrin, killing nearly 300 fighters.

The Kurdish YPG militia were America's boots on the ground in the successful war against ISIS, and the Department of Defense earlier this month announced a plan to support a 30,000-strong force. That plan is in shambles now after Turkish fighters and tanks crushed their strong point in Afrin.

Vice President Pence's Middle East trip was one of the ultimate feel-good moments in American diplomatic history. But before we feel too good about ourselves, we should take stock our strategic humiliation in Syria.

The Turkish attack, cynically labeled "Operation Olive Branch," had Moscow's open approval, as the Russian press reported. Russian permission was required for Turkish warplanes to fly in Syrian air space. “Turkey and Russia are waging proxy war against the United States in Syria," Cengiz Çandar wrote yesterday in Al-Monitor.

With the support of Russia, China, and Iran, Tinpot Tayyip Erdogan flipped the bird to the United States of America, and got away with it.

Erdogan at the White House May 2017

On Wednesday (1/24), President Donald Trump had a long talk with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The telephone call came in the wake of Erdogan’s most recent demonstration of the fact that under his leadership, the Turkish-American alliance has become an empty shell.

The White House read-out of Trump’s conversation with Erdogan can be read in several ways.

Trump’s conversation with Erdogan appeared to be an attempt to bridge the yawning gap between the US’s policy of supporting and working with the Kurds in Syria and its deference for Erdogan and his regime.

The read-out of their conversation also reflected the distinct possibility that the Trump administration is implementing a sophisticated strategy for contending with Erdogan’s Turkey and its open and growing hostility to the US and its allies.

To understand that strategy it is first imperative to understand the present state of Turkey’s military.

Lubyanka – KGB Headquarters in Moscow

Suppose what many are now suspecting is completely true -- that the FBI, or parts of it, exonerated Hillary Clinton and her cohorts with a mock investigation, attempted to swing our presidential election against Donald Trump and then continued to undermine the new administration after they had won with illegitimate claims of Russian collusion orchestrated by sleazy political lowlifes?

While this is not quite Stalinist -- no one was tortured in Lubyanka or sent to the Gulag for life -- it's not all that distant. It's tantamount to an internal coup d'état that is still ongoing.

And just as in many coups throughout history, many of the participants are convinced they are doing the right thing, that they are on the side of justice, even though they are bending it, especially because they are bending it. The ends justify the means, as the old homicidal slogan goes.

The inside of the FBI, particularly at the higher reaches, seems to have been filled with a band of smug, self-righteous ideologues who would do anything, erase or rephrase anything, to get their way.  And then lie about it.  Either that or quote scripture.  Or form "secret societies."

Put another way, should "lying to the FBI" be a crime, when the FBI itself lies?  That's not a zen koan. That's reality.

So if -- and it's not that big an if anymore -- this story out of a spy novel (the density of Le Carré coupled with the outlandishness of Fleming) is indeed the truth, what do we do about it?  The answer is not easy.

Dreamers. You hear so much about them. Who are they?

Let’s not play word games. “Dreamers” are illegal aliens. Harsh but true. There are more than 1.3 million Dreamers living in the United States, of which 800,000 or so had registered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

They really shouldn’t be here. So they need to face the music, and start packing to leave. Shouldn’t they?

Oh, right -- we’re told they’re in this pickle through no fault of their own.  “No fault of their own” is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. And someday it will gain them an E-Z Pass to oodles of special privileges.

Before we give away the store, however, we might want to think this through. We seem to know what it means to be a Dreamer. But are Dreamers really Dreamers? Or could it be that some are actually DINOs (Dreamers in Name Only)?

The anonymous attack on comedian Aziz Ansari, essentially for being a lousy date and inconsiderate sex partner, has led some to think that the spate of attacks on men for sexual harassment and assault might be slowing down.

Although the account by “Grace,” the pseudonymous accuser, has been defended by many, others who have supported the outing of sexual assaulters have drawn the line at lumping bad dates in with more serious sexual malfeasance.

Still others hope that the absurdity of Grace’s charges will force a rollback of the ever-escalating demonization of men guilty of nothing more than failing to fulfill a woman’s subjective expectations even when not made explicit.

Don’t count on it.  Modern feminism for years has institutionalized a fundamental incoherence.

Women are the equals of men and should have the same autonomy and agency, particularly over their sexual choices. At the same time, they need protection from men, who are empowered by a persistent “patriarchy” that encodes in women’s psyches a deference to that power.

This internal contradiction has given us the Snowflake Feminists.

World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland.  Team Trump stormed the fortress of the global elites on their first day (1/24) in Davos, defiantly accusing foes of blinding the world with free trade humbug and abusing the international trade system.  Their boss arrives tomorrow (1/25) and delivers his keynote speech Friday (1/26).

The US economic cabinet – Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Rick Perry at Energy – said America has long been the victim of daily guerrilla warfare by trade hypocrites and is at last drawing its own sword in response, no longer willing to tolerate what it deems to be systematic gouging of the open US market.

“Trade wars are fought every single day: every single day there are always parties violating the rules and trying to take unfair advantage of things,” said Mr. Ross. “So a trade war has been in place for quite a little while. The difference is, US troops are now coming to the ramparts."

Mr. Ross denied that President Donald Trump is retreating into commercial isolation, insisting that the blizzard of 84 separate trade measures, probes and sanctions over the last year are a response to mercantilist abuses that have been tolerated for far too long.

“What has provoked a lot of the trade actions is inappropriate behavior on the part of our trading counter-parties.  Many countries are good at the rhetoric of free trade but actually practice extreme protectionism, and that is a problem the president is quite determined to deal with."

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum.  They ask if I don’t think his tweets and utterances are “beneath the dignity of the office.”  Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity.  There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.  Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?  And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – and through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end.  Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy.

Donald Trump continues to baffle. Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.)

Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.   Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.

Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration.

In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama, the Nobama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. It is an accomplishment that he alone could have achieved.

Warning courtesy of National Association of Rural Landowners NARLO

Did Trump misspeak…use a slur to make a point…and thereby arouse all those dainty Liberals into a snit?

Not far from where I’m writing this in Manhattan, the kosher butcher shop is long gone; across the street, the church that once stood tall is now boarded up.

But next to it stands a mosque newly built and freshly painted. English in the neighborhood is a foreign tongue and nobody knows Frank Sinatra.

The boys don’t play stickball. The girls in their veils don’t play hopscotch and all the cabs are driven by men from Somalia and Afghanistan.

Strangers are not greeted warmly.

That’s a snapshot of what troubles President Trump…not the mosque, but the culture shift,

Call him chauvinistic…call him profane…he doesn’t care.  Our President is fighting for America’s soul – for America’s very existence.

I read as much of Michael Wolff’s "Fire and Fury" as my stomach lining could stand, and then I watched Donald Trump’s last rally of the 2016 presidential election. Groucho Marx’s old line came to mind — “Who are you going to believe; me, or your own eyes?”

He spoke in Michigan, a swing state where Hillary Clinton didn’t bother to campaign, and he hammered on the issues that decided the vote: more jobs, no Obamacare, Washington corruption. Trump was focused, confident, and ruthless.

“Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the Presidency of the United States…. We are finally going to close the history books on the Clintons, and their lies, schemes and corruption…. My contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end government corruption and to take our country back from the special interests…. We’re going to win today and we’re going to Washington D.C. to drain the swamp.”  

The crowd of 18,000 chanted “Drain the swamp!” back at him.

That’s the man who neither expected nor wanted to win, according to Wolff. There stood Donald Trump on the day before the election, declaring that he would win, in the middle of the state whose votes would make him win, talking about the issues on which he would win.

Most Millennials are too young to be intimately familiar with the Rocky films.  The original was released in 1976 and was a huge hit, making unknown actor Sylvester Stallone an instant superstar.

Rocky Balboa, a nobody fighter gets a chance at boxing stardom by fighting the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed.  The fight is a P.R. stunt.  Creed needs an appeal-to-the-people fight, "a novelty."  He decides to give "a local underdog" fighter an opportunity.  "A snow-white underdog.  Very American!"

Donald Trump is the Rocky of our current political framework.  Once he announced, the late-night comics had a field day mocking the man and his candidacy.  Political elites assumed that the run was a publicity stunt.

There is a scene in Rocky in which a newswoman is interviewing Rocky at a meat locker, where Rocky's friend is employed and lets him train by hitting huge sides of beef.

Back at Apollo Creed's fancy office, no one is paying attention to the television newscast except one of Creed's trainers.  He alone sees something in Rocky – a talent and a determination no one else has yet observed.  No one listens to the trainer when he tells his boss, "This boy means business."  And to the Left’s dismay, so did Donald Trump.

In those ubiquitous YouTube videos riffing on that famous scene from “Downfall,” Hitler flies off the handle when he learns that all is lost, so by now there’s a cottage industry of adapting that scene to the every perceived political “downfall.”

I happened to obtain a transcript of another delusional leader, Nancy Pelosi, after she had a similar reaction upon learning that the Republican tax bill was passed into law.

THE SCENE. Nancy Pelosi is seated at a desk in a crowded windowless room. Standing directly in front of Pelosi is House Democrat Whip Steny Hoyer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The rest of the group consists of deeply concerned Senators and Representatives.

Schumer places a large poster on her desk. It’s a list of the GOP tax bill highlights.

Back in those pre-9/11 days when I identified as a liberal, the one thing I was sure drew all my then cohort together was opposition to fascism, whether secular or religious.

Boy, was I wrong -- and never was that more clear than in June 2009 when the Green Movement demonstrators were marching through the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, demanding freedom from the mullahs.

The students and others marching in the streets to overthrow these tyrants desperately wanted America's help, specifically the support of our "oh-so-liberal-progressive" president. They shouted, "Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?"

Obama was silent.

I can't think of a moment I was more disgusted by the acts (inaction actually) of an American president. What did he stand for? What did we stand for?  Now at last we have a president who humiliates Obama’s despicable silence.

For good or evil, we may see radical changes in North Korea in 2018.

The beefed-up United Nations sanctions by midyear could lead to widespread North Korean hunger, as well as the virtual end of the country's industry and transportation.

In the past, the West had called off such existential sanctions and rushed in cash and humanitarian aid on news of growing starvation. Would it now if the bleak alternative was a lunatic's nuclear missile possibly striking San Diego or Seattle?

China has always been unwilling to give up pit bull North Korea as its client. The Kim dynasty has proved especially useful over the past 30 years for aggravating and distracting the Chinese communist government's archenemy, Japan, and its chief rival, the United States.

Beijing's sponsorship of the rogue nuclear regime in North Korea could increasingly become bad business, given global anxieties over the many possible trajectories of North Korea nuclear missiles.

What are some likely scenarios for 2018?  Here are five.

Northern China is facing an energy crisis this winter due to shortfalls in heating gas.  Many schools have not had heating since November 15—though the average temperature during the day has been close to, or below freezing. These schools were required to remove coal-fired heating ahead of the winter season as part of a larger initiative to reduce smog and CO2 emissions.

As the world’s top consumer and producer of coal, this is no easy task. In fact, China consumes four times as much coal as all of Europe (including Russia) and Central Asia combined.

By contrast, Chinese consumption of natural gas in 2016 was eight times its level in 2000.  However, the attempts to smoothly transition from coal to gas appears to have failed and are the root cause of the current gas shortfall. Across China, the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has risen by 300 percent. This is having significant downstream effects and has led to rationing.

The effects of the shortages are spreading.  This is because the shortages and accompanying spike in prices are manifestations of a larger problem.