The meeting, as crucial as everyone believes it will be, should not occur. It is long past time for America to stop talking with the Chinese regime and start imposing costs for dangerous and other unacceptable behavior.

Talking sounds as if it should work but in fact has produced horrible results, for more than three decades. In short, dialogue enables China to buy time and often run out the clock.

Biden as president has already had five phone or video calls with Xi, so by now it should be clear what his red lines are. Moreover, on any day, People's Daily lists them.

[T]he Chinese are not real believers in the importance of dialogue; they break it off whenever they feel it is to their advantage.

[D]uring summits presidents often convey warnings, seek understanding, or propose joint action. "There is no reason to think Xi Jinping is prepared to seek understanding or would take constructive joint action," he said. "It also is extremely unlikely that he believes or respects words of warning from the Biden administration. Given that, a side meeting on the margins of the G20 is pointless or counterproductive." — Steve Yates, chairman of the China Policy Initiative of the America First Policy Institute, to Gatestone, November 2022.

It is time... for America to get ready for the war that is coming. That means, among other things, bolstering those defending free societies, not emboldening those intent on attacking them.

"Refusing to speak is what children do when they are angry," the Economist states. No, refusing to speak is what leaders do when speaking for decades has created one of the most dangerous moments in history.

Part of the reason for the Palestinian Authority's unwillingness to let the people decide [in elections] is their understandable concern that Hamas will once again prevail.

[T]here is an added reason for why Israelis who used to vote for the left have moved rightward: Hamas rockets, Hezbollah tunnels, Palestinian terrorism, and the unwillingness of the Palestinian Authority to accept generous peace offers in 2000, 2001 and 2008.

It is not enough to remind the world that most Arab and Muslim countries have anti-gay, anti-female and anti-freedom-of-religion policies. More must be said and done.

The same may be true of the United States. But only Israel is condemned....

For many long-term Israel-bashers, the recent election merely provides a new excuse for an old bigotry.

Iran already has a military-security regime that uses a pseudo-religious narrative as a cover for what is a very this-worldly and brutal pursuit of power and wealth.

If the mullahs created the IRGC to protect their power and privilege, the IRGC, in turn created the Basij militia and a dozen other instruments of oppression to protect its own power and wealth.

Those who describe the present regime in Iran as a theocracy are victims of a visual error by not noticing the military cap under the turban.

The IRGC cannot deliver Iran from the Khomeinist nightmare because it has been and remains the key instrument pushing Iran into that nightmare.

Iran doesn't need a military coup to replace one form of despotism with another. What it needs is a national consensus to restore our constitutional system and its aspirations that produced Reza Shah in the context of national sovereignty and the rule of law.

In other words stop looking for boots and start looking at the path chosen by those on the march towards a better future for Iran.