RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-pandemic-hungary-prime-minister-viktor-orban-not-a-dictator/

Worries about Hungarian authoritarianism prove overblown, but are they hiding the real danger?

One wonders if it will be recorded in the history books that from March 30th to June 20th Hungary lived as the shortest dictatorship in European history, before voluntarily extinguishing itself. An odd act for a dictatorship. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary had used the coronavirus to make himself dictator for life, it was said. But I guess he only had it in him to be dictator for life for less than three months.

Our most important experts on democracy and Eastern Europe knew that Viktor Orbán had really done it this time. Yasmeen Serhan, writing in The Atlantic this April, declared: “There is a line between using emergency powers and outright authoritarianism—one that Hungary has undoubtedly crossed.”

“The brazenness of Orbán’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history,” wrote Dalibor Rohac in the Washington Post, predicting confidently that absent a “strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”

It was on March 30th that the Hungarian Parliament approved a state-of-emergency law to deal with coronavirus that gave power to Viktor Orbán’s government to pass laws by decree, and instituted severe-looking restrictions on the dissemination of fake news. Several European countries had already passed enabling acts of this sort — France has seemed to go in and out of such states of emergency regularly in the last decade. That the emergency powers were a feature of Hungary’s existing constitution, limited by that constitution not to touch fundamental rights and subject to a parliamentary check, troubled none of these analysts.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16063/poll-support-for-china

A soon to be released international survey finds that when the COVID-19 virus finally burns itself out its biggest victim may be the very country that launched the pandemic —China.

Bluster, bullying, and propaganda launched by China’s leadership to subdue international criticism of their handling of COVID-19 is only stoking the anger among nations as diverse as the U.K., Germany and India, according to data revealed during a comprehensive poll conducted by the firm McLaughlin & Associates.

They may not embrace the White House on any given issue but when it comes to China, a large and significant number of those polled in this global COVID-19 survey would now support economic sanctions, confronting China’s strategy to achieve global dominance by controlling worldwide access to technology, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and more.

What can only be described as a diplomatic earthquake is the emerging political fault line along China’s southern border with India.

The McLaughlin poll found that a majority of voters in the world’s largest democracy, some 54%, believe China hid key COVID-19 details, resulting in more damage by the pandemic, and 78% believe China knowingly kept data from the international community.

And it gets worse for Beijing. As many as 85% of Indian voters believe China should be held accountable with 88% approving of an investigation of not just China but the World Health Organization (WHO) regarding what did they know and when did they know it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-pandemic-china-united-states-west-must-end-dangerous-dependence-on-beijing/

As the pandemic has made clear, the U.S., and the West as a whole, cannot continue to depend on an authoritarian rival state for strategically important goods.

 I t is not necessary to agree with all of President Donald Trump’s foreign policies in order to agree with one of his foreign policies. His approach to China is a case in point.

Since it emerged late last year, the coronavirus has brought into sharp focus the outlines of the international system and amplified long-standing tensions between Washington and Beijing. Many of Trump’s critics have identified him as part of the problem, arguing that an “America first” foreign policy — which was written into the official National Security Strategy that his administration published in 2017 — at best undermines international cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus and at worse obstructs it. A divided West, the argument goes, is ceding global leadership to China.

Yet the pandemic has highlighted something that Trump’s National Security Strategy identified three years ago. Instead of becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system — a term coined by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in 2005 to describe the role that the Bush administration hoped China would play following its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) — China has instead “expanded its power at the expense of others.”