RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-holds-a-hostage-for-spying-on-the-dead-1540852246

Give President Trump credit for bringing unjustly detained Americans home. Whatever misgivings you may have about his North Korean diplomacy, three American prisoners freed in May are better for it. So is Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey released this month. “I hope my husband is next,” Hua Qu tells me. “He has literally been taken hostage by Iran.”

Her husband is Xiyue Wang, a history graduate student at Princeton arrested in Tehran in August 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in the notorious Evin Prison. He is one of at least five Americans currently detained in Iran—and the only one who doesn’t also hold Iranian citizenship.

Mr. Wang, then 35, ventured to Iran in January 2016 to research the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Persia from 1794 to 1925. The espionage allegation came after he copied thousands of pages of research material from the National Archives of Iran. As one of his Princeton professors put it, Mr. Wang was accused of “spying on the dead.” The documents he copied were from between 1840 and 1910, according to Ms. Qu.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/geopolitics-trumps-the-markets-1540852514

That crashing sound you heard in world markets last week wasn’t just a correction. It was the sound of the end of an age.

During the long era of relatively stable international relations that succeeded the Cold War, markets enjoyed an environment uniquely conducive to economic growth. The U.S. faced no peer competitors, and the most important great powers generally (if sometimes selectively) supported Washington’s emphasis on opening markets and reducing barriers to investment and trade. The positive-sum logic of economics trumped zero-sum international politics in the halls of power world-wide.

The results were extraordinary. Between 1990 and 2017, world-wide gross domestic product rose from $23.4 trillion to $80.1 trillion, the value of world trade grew even faster, more than a billion people escaped poverty, and infant-mortality rates decreased by more than 50%. The number of people with telephone service grew roughly 10-fold.

This hiatus from history was, by most measures of human flourishing, a glorious era. Now it has come to an end, or at least a pause, and the world is beginning to see what that means.

During the Obama administration, foreign-policy observers began to speak of “the return of geopolitics”—the idea that the international arena was increasingly defined by competition among strategic rivals. Russia, China and Iran were “revisionist” powers that aimed to upend the post-Cold War era of American dominance. These powers enjoyed growing success, particularly during President Obama’s second term. By the time Mr. Trump took office, there was little doubt a much more challenging geopolitical environment had taken shape. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/angela-merkel-down-and-soon-out/

After another disastrous showing in local elections, German chancellor Angela Merkel will step down as the leader of her political party, the Christian Democratic Union, and not seek re-election as chancellor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Monday that she would not seek re-election when her term expires in 2021. Merkel, who has been Chancellor since 2005, made the announcement during a news conference today in Berlin. “It is time today for me to start a new chapter,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin.
“This fourth term is my last term as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the next Bundestag election in 2021, I will not run again as Chancellor. I will not run for the German Bundestag any more, and I do not want any other political office.” Merkel told reporters that being Chancellor has been a “very challenging and fulfilling task.”

Better late than never — or perhaps not. Merkel’s decision to admit upward of a million Muslim “refugees” in 2015, ostensibly in the name of humanitarianism but in reality to combat Germany’s anemic birthrate by importing the next generation of “Germans” and hoping against all evidence that they will assimilate into Teutonic society, was the inciting incident in her fall from grace, but its effects will linger long after she is gone.

And gone she needs to be, long before 2021. The fig leaf is that while she’s quitting as CDU party leader, she’ll stay in office until the next election. The reality is, with her power base gone, she’ll be vacating the chancellery long before that. Merkel has been unable to admit her catastrophic error, and has been busily trying to bridge the yawning gulf between bien-pensant thinking about “immigration” and the reality on the ground by cobbling together an ad hoc coalition government with her nominal opposition, the Social Democrats. That coalition has now effectively cratered. So what comes next?

Over the past three years I’ve received many calls from the British media asking me whether Angela Merkel had finally received a knockout blow. And I’ve always replied: she’s down but not out. Now, however, she’s down and out. Her party’s top brass have forced her to announce that she won’t be running for the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at their conference in December. At the time of writing, she wants to remain chancellor. But by this time next year at the very latest, she’ll be out of that job, too. CONTINUE AT SITE