RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/07/australia-vanished-slept/

Like the concerned locals of Britain and, increasingly, of Europe, who every day must confront a new world not of their making, many Australians also feel something fundamental has changed. To put that sentiment in a few words, ‘We have lost our country.’

Two current must-reads are Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe and Sir Roger Scruton’s Where We Are: The state of Britain now. Each in its own way, and with a very British focus, speaks to the current malaise afflicting much of the West, and certainly Australia.

Setting aside muddled and weak leadership (with the now notable exception of the United States); universal cultural and moral decline; confusion over shared and, increasingly, disagreement over non-shared values; awful corporate behaviour, now revealed on a regular basis; gangs in suburbia; the disgrace that our national parliament has become; the bullying and non-platforming of opinions disagreeable to the elites; and fawning political correctness by the comfortable yet “woke” inner-city trendoids and their cheer squads – setting all this aside – there is something else at work that is creating a sense of deep and broad malaise among the so-called Deplorables and Dis-cons among us.

That something is the growing sense that “our country isn’t ours any more”.

The markers are there and all around us – the unease at China- linked companies buying land and key infrastructure assets (a concern shared, extraordinarily, by both Clive Hamilton and the National Civic Council); whole suburbs of our cities becoming ghettoes, often violent and unsafe; that feeling of walking into the public reception area at Sydney Airport and wondering, “Where am I? Is this Australia?”; being forced by our politicians and cultural elites to bow and scrape before the religion and religion-related regulations, objectives and lifestyles of our recent Middle Eastern arrivals. And so on.

Douglas Murray speaks to this unease, as does Roger Scruton. Murray hones in on the sudden and, for Britain, unprecedented mass migration that has occurred in the UK since the late 1990s, initially championed by Tony Blair’s Government and pursued in a bi-partisan way thereafter. He also claims, in particular, that this sudden new policy was justified in very dubious ways, and was effected without the permission of the public. The push-back, as seen in the Brexit vote, has been palpable.

Scruton has provided what will one day become the go-to conservative case against rampant globalisation, with its free movement of capital across borders and the mass movement of people around the globe. These developments, were allowed, indeed encouraged and championed, by governments in the West, andc they took place largely without anyone’s explicit, democratic permission and subtly, piece by piece, without even the knowledge of most of the public. Scruton refers in particular to the decision taken by the UK Government of the day to allow the ownership of land by foreigners as a critical development – but merely one – in a chain of events that has seen, ultimately, the dismembering of communities, regions, traditions and sub-cultures.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/killing-of-the-romanovs-16030.html

The family was roused early in the morning and told to dress in preparation for an immediate change of location. They were brought to a dingy basement room and ordered to wait, while their killers fortified themselves with liquid courage. One hundred years ago, in the early hours of July 17, 1918, the abdicated Czar Nicholas II and his immediate family, along with four retainers, were murdered, and buried in haste under cover of night.

Studying the years that led to that savage night, it’s hard not to want to shout across time at the last Romanov, to wake him from his walking stupor. His feckless rule was marked by indecision and half-steps at political reform, the necessity of which was obvious to everyone. Sergei Witte, the brilliant diplomat and reformer who engineered Russia’s first constitution, warned Nicholas in 1905 that “Russia has outgrown its existing governmental forms. . . . You must give the people their constitution; otherwise, they will wrest one away.”

Nicholas dithered, while also imploring his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to become dictator. The Grand Duke (known as “Tall Nicholas,” for his imposing height) took out his pistol and said that he would shoot himself in the head if the czar refused to sign the decree authorizing the formation of a parliament. Nicholas, himself incapable of dramatic, decisive gestures, signed.

From the outset of his reign, Nicholas was as detached from authority as he was captivated by the weight and romance of its history. His own mother told Witte, years before the premature death of her husband, Czar Alexander III, that Nicholas was incapable of ruling and lacked the character and will to become emperor. His rule bears out this judgment. Inspired by the ideal of the mystical union of the “people and the czar,” Nicholas possessed the political worldview of an early-modern absolutist, along the lines of King James I of England. He tried to convince himself, while revolt and turmoil boiled around him, that the 300-year legacy of the divinely inspired Romanov rule could not possibly end with him.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-putin-agree-to-try-to-solve-syria-crisis-preserve-israels-security-1531771710

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to work together on solving the Syrian crisis—with both focusing on the need to guarantee Israel’s security.

In recent weeks, Russian-backed forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime made major advances toward Israel and Jordan in the southwest of the country, routing the remaining pockets of the Sunni Arab opposition the U.S. once supported.

At the same time, Israel ramped up airstrikes against Iranian military targets and pro-Iranian militias across Syria, part of its drive to prevent the establishment of a permanent Iranian military presence there.

For Israel, the key demand is that Syrian regime forces stay away from the demilitarized buffer zone along the 1974 cease-fire line between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan Heights—an area the United Nations supervised before the Syrian war erupted in 2011.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after talks with Mr. Putin in Moscow last week that Israel had no problem with Mr. Assad as long as his forces didn’t attempt to penetrate that demilitarized zone.

Mr. Putin on Monday endorsed that request.

“After the definitive defeat of the terrorists in the southwest of Syria, the situation on the Golan Heights must be brought into full compliance with the 1974 disengagement agreement,” Mr. Putin said. “This would return calm to the Golan, restore the cease-fire, and safely guarantee the security of the State of Israel.”

Mr. Putin remained silent about Israeli strikes against Iranian targets in Syria—attacks that Russia’s formidable air-defense systems haven’t attempted to prevent.

Mr. Trump said he and Mr. Putin shared a commitment to Israel’s security, adding, “I made clear we will not allow Iran to benefit from our successful campaign against ISIS,” referring to Islamic State. Mr. Netanyahu thanked both presidents after the Helsinki meeting.

A key issue left unaddressed for now, at least in public, was the future of U.S. troops in Syria. These forces are mostly deployed in the Kurdish-controlled areas of eastern Syria that have been liberated from Islamic State—and that contain a large share of Syria’s oil and gas resources. U.S. airstrikes repulsed an attempt by regime troops and Russian mercenaries to advance into those areas in February—an event that resulted in massive casualties among the mercenaries, embarrassing Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants all U.S. forces gone from Syria—something that would likely lead to the demise of the Kurdish statelet there. One proposal making the rounds in Washington and backed by some Israeli officials would attempt to trade that American withdrawal for a Russian agreement to an Iranian military pullout from Syria.

“Assad should respect the 1974 separation agreements, and it is important that Putin and Trump both expect him to do it,” said retired Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of analysis at Israel’s military intelligence. “But Israel wants Iran not to be allowed to stay in all of Syria, not just the Golan Heights.”

It is far from certain, however, that Mr. Putin has the capacity to force Iran out of Syria even if he wanted to do so.

“The maximalist position of a full Iranian withdrawal from Syria is neither achievable for Moscow nor is it desirable for it as long as the political settlement in Syria has yet to be reached,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.hoover.org/research/why-europe-gets-no-respect

After the recent G-7 meeting, some European nations such as France and Germany expressed anger that their views were given short shrift by Donald Trump—displaying fits of pique memorialized in a now infamous photo of standing G-7 leaders who were leaning into a surrounded and sitting Trump. “International cooperation,” huffed an unidentified senior French official, “cannot depend on being angry and on sound bites. Let’s be serious.” The former British ambassador to the U.S., Peter Westmacott, sniffed, “Trump is readier to give a pass to countries that pose a real threat to Western values and security than to America’s traditional allies. If there is a ‘method to the madness,’ to use the words of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, it is currently well hidden.”

Yet in current foreign policy journals, a constant theme is European leaders who lament that Europe does not get its due on the world stage. Why would that be?

After all, if “Europe” is defined by the membership of the 28-member European Union, then it should easily be the world’s superpower. The European project now has an aggregate population (512 million) that dwarfs that of the United States (326 million). Even its GDP ($20 trillion) is often calibrated as roughly equivalent to or even larger than America’s ($19 trillion).

Historically, European geography has been strategically influential—with windows on the Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean, the ancient maritime nexus of three continents. Rome is the center of Christianity, by far the world’s largest religion. Some of the world’s great nations—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the United States—were birthed as European colonies. Some two billion people speak European languages, including hundreds of millions outside of Europe whose first language is English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

European products—Airbus, BP, Shell, and Volkswagen—are global household names. France each year hosts the greatest number of the world’s tourists. Europe as a whole is more visited than any other nation or geographical area—and no wonder, given Europe was the home to civilization’s most significant breakthroughs: the birth of the city-state, the emergence of Roman republicanism and its later globalized empire, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.