It’s remarkable to listen to the national media whine about having “no images” from Thursday night’s state dinner at the White House, when the reason they have no images is that they’ve been boycotting the White House all week.
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Sure, the media boycott is in solidarity with fake-news CNN, MS-DNC, and Politico, which lost their White House press passes because they had become the mouthpiece for deep-staters still lurking in the corridors of the Old Executive Office Building.
Some of you reading this may not realize that a White House press pass gives you access to the entire White House complex, allowing reporters to roam the halls at will. The only exceptions are the residence, the Oval Office, and other sensitive West Wing offices such as the Cabinet Room, which require an escort.
All a reporter with a White House press pass needs to do is show it to the Marine at the gate, and they’re in.
Let’s say a CNN producer is sniffing for a scoop to make Trump look bad (the only kind of scoop CNN wants). Rather than enter through the gate on the White House lawn, they will use the 17th Street entrance, and ta-da! Now they have access to some 1,500 federal employees working for every White House office and task force, including the National Security Council.
Even the vice president has his working office in the OEOB—and we’ve seen how much vice presidents like to talk “off the record” with reporters!
Another remarkable moment was to watch Chuck Schumer urge Trump, “do not weaken America’s export controls,” to give China access to advanced chips and chip-making equipment.
That was a choice. After all, for years it’s been Democrat administrations who have done away with export controls, starting with Bill Clinton in 1993, who called them a “wasting asset.” If you want to know more about how that worked, read my March 1995 American Spectator piece, China Shops.
But Schumer didn’t stop there. “Stop kissing Xi’s A–” he said. Trump should “stop fawning over strong men,” he added, apparently forgetting how Obama bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia, or Jimmy Carter called Ayatollah Khomeini a “man of God.”
The only reason China has become a near competitor with the United States is that Democrat administrations sold them the machine tools, computers, and chip-making gear to compete with us. You can read the whole story in my book, Selling Out America.
Advisers to both Trump and Xi said the summit was all about achieving “strategic stability.”
In practical terms, that means cooling tensions, especially in public, while talking about the hard things behind closed doors.
One of those hard subjects, of course, is China’s support for the Iranian regime. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that China sent 1,300 shipments of dual-use equipment for Iran’s missiles and drones to Iran’s Ministry of Defense earlier this year, including shipments sent the day after Iran signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S.
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As the Journal described it: “The boxes are packed with GPS tracking devices, electric motors, and aircraft engine parts, according to Iranian customs records provided by trade database ImportGenius. … Many of the entries are marked with a reference to ‘Article 119,’ a section in Iranian customs regulations that grants full tariff exemptions for armaments and defense imports.”
We don’t know if China has stopped those deliveries, but Trump’s behavior toward Xi suggests it has.
The two leaders are expected to sign a trade deal that includes China lifting its 15 percent import duty on U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) and a pledge to purchase LNG worth $6 billion from Venture Global in exchange for reducing U.S. tariffs on Chinese consumer goods.
If concluded, the deal will go a long way to removing Iran’s leverage over China, leverage that is already dwindling with the U.S. blockade of Iranian oil.
The Iranians sent their hapless president to the UN General Assembly this week, where he whined along with congressional Democrats about the war. In an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, Pezeshkian reiterated the old canard that Iran was absolutely not seeking nuclear weapons because the ex-Ayatollah had called them un-Islamic.
He also sat down with White House negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff for three hours, negotiations that his boss back in Tehran, Supreme National Security Council chief Mohsen Rezai, promptly called “unauthorized.”
His sidekick, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, told CNBC that Iran was prepared to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days and restart nuclear talks with the United States.
Before you head down to the gas station to fill up on diesel, you need to know there’s a worm in that apple. Araghchi said that Iran was willing to restart talks “if the Trump administration accepts [our] conditions.”
“The conditions we have asked the U.S. to meet are nothing new, nothing more than what was already in the Islamabad MOU, which was signed by the U.S. president,” he added. In other words, the U.S. capitulation to all Iranian demands.
As usual, the Iranians are talking through both sides of their mouth and blowing smoke out of both ears.
But that’s okay, because the Strait of Hormuz has become virtually irrelevant thanks to the U.S. Navy, which is escorting ships carrying more than 10 million barrels per day through the Strait and blockading Iranian oil from reaching world markets, predominantly China.
All in all, three good days for President Trump. No fireworks, no bloodbaths. Just solid, mostly behind-the-scenes work.
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