RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-korea-11615245637?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

The Journal reports that Kim Jong Un’s authorized biography is out and a Korean-language edition has been uploaded to the web. The authors are, unsurprisingly, bullish on Mr. Kim. The closing section (“Spinning the World Under the Axis of Sovereignty and Justice”) hails Mr. Kim’s summits with leaders including Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in. Summing it up, the authors gush that “there has never been a time when all the world has been this focused on our people’s greatness and dignity in our 5,000-year history.”

They are not wrong. North Korea, with a gross domestic product estimated at less than $26 billion and a population of 26 million, punches well above its weight. Kim Jong Un doesn’t see himself as the crackpot leader of a failed state. He sees himself as a winner, the uncontested leader of a tiny state that by ruthless dedication has forced the greatest powers in the world to deal with it as an equal.

As another American administration struggles with the difficult and thankless task of developing a North Korea strategy, the Biden team needs to understand that even severe sanctions are unlikely to work. For years sanctions proponents have argued that if the U.S. could only get full Chinese cooperation, North Korea would have no choice but to accept some kind of denuclearization process.

This is unlikely. China, annoyed as it often is by North Korea’s unpredictable and disruptive approach to politics, would never agree to sanctions stringent enough to risk destabilizing a neighboring country. More important, the Kims are not easily swayed by economic pressure. In an effort to contain Covid, Pyongyang has voluntarily imposed an isolation on itself far more devastating than sanctions ever could be. Trade with China is down 80%. GDP is down an estimated 10%. Grain production is slated to fall one million tons below the 5.5 million tons required to feed its populace. Major factories have closed due to shortages of spare parts, and blackouts are widespread.

Despite all this, the government is signaling its determination to stand fast until the pandemic ends. Not for the first time, Pyongyang is demonstrating that it will impose massive suffering on its population to pursue its goals. Perhaps this determination would crack in the face of even direr conditions, but a mass famine did not force the regime to abandon its nuclear program in the 1990s. Sanctions alone, however severe, will not bring this country to heel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17159/china-naval-threat

China’s navy is now the world’s largest. It has been for some time. The U.S. Navy may still rule the oceans, but the Chinese rule the vital trade routes in the South China Sea.

China means to threaten the economic security of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and others. America must remain resolute in the face of this build-up in order to maintain freedom of commerce in the Asian seas.

They would say their naval buildup is “for defensive purposes,” but their neighbors do not buy that for a minute…. [China’s] clear intention, for now at least, is to overwhelm anything in its vicinity that threatens its expansion and domination of the Asian sea lanes.

As the Pentagon also noted in its report, the Chinese Communist Party does not intend for its navy to be merely “a showpiece of China’s modernity or to keep it focused solely on regional threats.” It will grow with China’s ambitions.

Its fourth aircraft carrier, however, is expected to be China’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and its first to use advanced launching and landing systems…. Thus, China intends to have a blue-water navy to challenge the U.S. in several years.

All the force investments in the world won’t matter if the US fails to impose enough diplomatic and economic costs to alter Chinese behavior.” — Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Deutsche Welle, October 21, 2020.

For Americans used to having the biggest and most modern military forces in the world, it is humbling to realize that China’s Navy is now the world’s largest. It has been for some time. The U.S. Navy may still rule the oceans, but China rules the vital trade routes in the South China Sea.

Pentagon planners know this and have called out China’s work on building both capital ships and the swarms of smaller escort vessels that will project the dragon’s breath across those critical trade routes for years to come. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is building their capability to control and possibly interdict shipping from other Asian nations, mostly as an economic and political lever. China means to threaten the economic security of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and others. America must remain resolute in the face of this build-up in order to maintain freedom of commerce in the Asian seas.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17151/turkey-attack-yazidis

If Turkey targets Sinjar, it will not be the first Turkish military assault against the region. In 2017, Turkish warplanes dropped bombs on Sinjar, hitting a civilian clinic.

“‘[A]nalysts should understand that the fundamental reason that Yezidis join military units is to defend the land from a genocidal invasion…. no one, including Turkey, has the right to expel Yezidis from their homeland under the pretext of the conflict with PKK.” — Pari Ibrahim, Executive Director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, interview with Gatestone, February 3, 2021.

“We want Sinjar to be under the control of formal Iraqi security forces…. according to the rule of law. Turkey wants much more than Sinjar. Turkey wants to use various excuses to expand its military presence in Iraq and Syria. The whole PKK claim is just an excuse for Turkey’s expansionism in the region.” — Murad Ismael, former executive director of Yazda, interview with Gatestone, February 12, 2021

“Yezidis literally suffered a genocide at the hands of ISIS… Turkey did not take any steps whatsoever to combat ISIS before, during, or after the ISIS atrocities. But now, when Yezidis have been left homeless and are striving to rebuild our land, Turkey warns that it may unilaterally and illegally attack Sinjar…. this is our homeland. It is not a battleground for other forces to use as they see fit.” — Pari Ibrahim, interview with Gatestone, February 3, 2021.

Turkey’s armed forces launched a military operation called “Operation Claw-Eagle 2” against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq on February 10. The assault resulted in the deaths of 13 Turkish hostages, including military and police personnel who were being held by the PKK in a cave complex in the mountainous Gara region.

Turkey’s military operation, in the form of airstrikes, was completed on February 14. Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar announced that 48 PKK members had been “neutralized” in the operation, adding that the PKK had shot the hostages dead — one in the shoulder, and the rest in their heads.

The PKK, however, said that the deaths of the hostages had been caused by the “Turkish army’s heavy bombardments and intense fighting outside and inside the [PKK] camp.”

https://www.aier.org/article/chinas-role-in-global-lockdowns-the-smoking-gun/

This time last year, Americans were blindsided by a shocking policy to shut down the US economy to control a virus. The presumption of the officials who enacted this policy is that it would be far more deadly than it turned out to be. They further presumed that the virus could be controlled using state power, precisely as China had claimed to have done in Wuhan. 

There are so many problems with all these presumptions, and AIER has covered them almost daily since January 2020. What we’ve lacked until now is an inside look into how US officials, the architects of the lockdowns, went about their decision making. What were their influences? Who was pushing for these policies? 

For the better part of a year, evidence has been mounting that the Chinese Communist Party played an outsized role. We have Dr. Fauci on the record praising the Wuhan response, and many World Health Organization officials as well. AIER has published much of this evidence already. Our December 8, 2020, article on the topic prompted a steady torrent of DDoS attacks on our site that continue to this day. 

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request initiated by Judicial Watch, we now have 300 pages of emails that landed on Fauci’s email account. They are a picture of chaos. Within that chaos, there is one dominant influence: China. We learn that a US delegation actually went to China to learn about pandemic response in mid-February. We see US officials praising the Communist Party and the “lockdowns” while plotting them right here in the US. 

There is much more to discover within the Fauci emails, which are revealing despite all the redactions. For your reading pleasure or disgust, we offer them here.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/france-yes-he-murdered-jewish-woman-while-robert-spencer/

Here’s a new one: the marijuana excuse. For years authorities all over Europe have dismissed clear cases of jihad violence as “mental illness,” but that one is so overused now, it’s understandable that officials would be casting about for new and imaginative ways to hoodwink their people into think that there really isn’t any jihad in the West at all, just a few unfortunate incidents and misunderstood adherents of the world’s most peaceful and tolerant religion. But sometimes even willfully ignorant dhimmi authorities can go too far with this wishful thinking.

So it is that in France, according to the Jerusalem Post Thursday, the appellate Court of Cassation has begun deliberations on whether to overturn the ruling that a Muslim named Kabili Traoré, who murdered an elderly Jewish woman while screaming “Allahu akbar,” will not be tried because he was high on marijuana at the time of the killing. That’s right: French authorities are on record now that if you get high, killing Jews is A-OK.

The cannabis, you see, allegedly compromised Traoré’s “discernment.” The lower court judge “cited psychiatric evaluations saying Traoré’s consumption of marijuana before the incident led to a ‘delirious episode’ that made him not legally responsible for his actions.” The millions of Americans who have smoked marijuana might wonder how it is that they never got so stoned as to think that throwing a 65-year-old woman out of the window of her third-floor apartment was just the thing to do, but that is now a matter for the Court of Cassation to decide. Muriel Ouaknine Melki, who is a lawyer for the family of Traoré’s victim, Sarah Halimi, observed that the appeal will establish whether or not “the consumption of narcotics can be a cause for exonerating from penal responsibility in criminal matters.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-chinese-communist-party-11615153949?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Chinese state media rarely deserves attention but lately it’s taken a notable and instructive turn. It is invoking the woke themes of American progressives as a propaganda weapon against the U.S.

“Canada, the UK and Australia, three members of the Five Eyes alliance, have recently taken action to put pressure on China. They have formed a US-centered, racist, and mafia-styled community,” said a Feb. 23 editorial in Global Times. “They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese.”

The Communist Party-run paper notes that the members of Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing network, “have a strong sense of civilization superiority.” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton is a “neo-Nazi and extreme racist” and “the Trump administration is an extremely typical white supremacy government.” By resisting this bloc of English-speaking countries, the editorial concludes, “China is not only defending its own interests, we are also defending the diversity of the modern world.”

Note the use of “white supremacy” and “diversity” and “civilization superiority,” which come straight from the progressive critique of America as a country that is “systemically” racist and oppressive. The Global Times editors may be crude but they’ve obviously been reading the New York Times. Their dismissal of Mr. Cotton as racist is what you see on progressive Twitter.

The Chinese Military Threat

Communist China views the United States as its major adversary and is building an awesome military arsenal, with modern weapons, planes and missiles. China already has the world’s largest army (3 million men), 5,000 combat aircraft, and 300 nuclear warheads. The Chinese shopping list includes aircraft carriers, missile-equipped warships, nuclear attack submarines, fighter aircraft, and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads.

China is capable of buying such costly, warlike luxuries only because of the U.S. cash that flows from the pockets of Americans, known as our trade deficit, which has been running about $40 billion a year for some years. That’s enough money to build up a military/nuclear force capable of threatening the United States, as well as dominating the Pacific.

China’s expansionist aspirations are no secret. Now that China has pocketed Hong Kong, China can turn its avaricious eyes on Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Guam, and even threaten the sailors of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. When China was harassing Taiwan during its election, General Chi of the People’s Liberation Army crudely commented about China’s ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on Los Angeles.

A classified Air Force report released in May 1997 warned that China’s effort to build an advanced ICBM capability is “steadily increasing.” The report stated that this missile “will be a significant threat not only to U.S. forces deployed in the Pacific theater, but to portions of the continental United States and to many of our allies.”

China is determined not only to become a nuclear superpower but also a world-class industrial power, and the Communist bosses expect slave labor, theft, and U.S. folly to help them achieve those goals. They require a transfer of U.S. high technology as part of every business deal so that, in the next round, they expect to manufacture the goods without U.S. help and become a major exporter of cars, chemicals, steel, electronics, and aircraft. China has made several spectacular deals, which pretended to be merely commercial, but will vastly expand China’s military and industrial espionage and subversive capabilities.

The China Ocean Shipping Company (Cosco), a 600-ship global shipping company controlled by the People’s Liberation Army, is trying hard to acquire a 20-year lease on the U.S. Naval Shipyard in Long Beach. Clinton personally lobbied for the Cosco deal at a White House meeting in September 1995. U.S. taxpayers recently spent $500 million to modernize this deep-water port at the epicenter of our defense research and production in southern California. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is trying to amend the Defense Authorization bill to stop the deal from going through.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/what-china-really-wants-a-new-world-order/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-what-china-really-wants-a-new-world-order&itm_

Translated speeches from a leading Beijing scholar-adviser provide a rare guide to the Chinese Communist Party’s plans for domination. Call it a rhapsody in red.

What does the Chinese Communist Party actually want? Sometimes, the regime’s plans can seem inscrutable. Other times, they are more blunt. The latter is certainly the case for one high-profile Chinese scholar serving the Party: Jin Canrong, the Chinese “State Master,” a professor at the Chinese People’s University in Beijing, a U.S. expert, and an adviser to the Chinese Communist Party’s Organization Department and United Front Department. It’s unclear how close he is to Xi Jinping. But he is one of the intellectuals sarcastically referred to in China as “the Emperor’s Literary Men” or “the State Masters.” He has spoken throughout China and is well-known among Netizens. That the U.S. State Department suspended the ten-year visa of this State Master, along with nine other Chinese scholars, in January 2020 suggests that Donald Trump’s administration must have been aware of him as well.

His speeches may reflect the thought of CCP leaders. In 2018, I first read the transcripts of two of his public speeches from two years earlier. I was greatly alarmed. His words contradicted all the beautiful public utterances of CCP leaders, such as, “We will never become a hegemon” and, “We have no intention to challenge the U.S. leadership.” That was the first time I was truly impressed by the degree of China’s power and ambition. I have kept the transcripts. As the U.S. reckons with the growing CCP threat not only to the U.S.-led international order but also to the U.S. itself, now seems a good time to share the content of these speeches.

The two speeches range widely and erratically. I am not attempting a complete translation. Instead, I am excerpting some parts relevant to the U.S., regrouping them into a “rhapsody” of six “movements.” A rhapsody is an epic poem, or part of one; a medley, with extravagance of ideas and expressions. That describes the two speeches excerpted here. They also serve as part of the ode of the CCP’s grand plan in the so-called “Chinese Century” to dominate the world. The State Master’s own words appear below in a different font from my notes or comments; my comments in the speech itself will appear in unitalicized brackets. The English translations are mine; I am responsible for their accuracy.

In 2012, at the CCP’s 18th plenary, it publicly announced two centenary goals. First, that, at the 100th anniversary of the CCP in 2021, all Chinese people will be free of poverty, and China will be a “well-off” society with per capita GDP of $10,000. Second, that, in 2049, at the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic, China will be a well-established socialist power with per capita GDP at $30,000. In Jin’s words, when the second goal is reached, “China will enter the club of developed countries.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/03/22/deter-beijing-from-attacking-taiwan/

Policies to keep great-power competition from becoming great-power conflict.

Over several decades, the People’s Republic of China has been coercing and intimidating Taiwan in an attempt to force “unification” of the de facto independent democratic island with the mainland. The U.S. has responded through mostly diplomatic means, working to help Taiwan avoid international isolation. But now the risk of a Sino–American military conflict over Taiwan is growing. Chinese Communist Party general-secretary Xi Jinping has stepped up his muscular rhetoric about “recovery” of what he views as lost Chinese territory, and his military is more ready than ever to act forcefully if called upon. But through coercive diplomacy the U.S. still has time to head off Chinese aggression. What is needed is a new diplomatic campaign backed by a quick strengthening of U.S. military posture.

On the matter of Taiwan, Xi is a dangerous man. His strategy for political survival inside the brutal, jungle-like CCP is to initiate constant political purges, mass campaigns to strengthen Communist Party ideology and discipline, crackdowns on dissent, and nationalistic adventures abroad, from Hong Kong to India. Taiwan is the logical next target, and Beijing is beating the drums of war.

On January 2, 2019, General-Secretary Xi declared that the annexation of Taiwan was necessary for China to achieve its “great rejuvenation” — his personal grand strategic ambition. Ending a commitment upon which the one-China policy was predicated, Xi also declared that China would not renounce the use of force to accomplish its Taiwan objectives. The CCP released a policy paper expanding on Xi’s claims. It said: 

Solving the Taiwan problem and achieving complete national unification is in the fundamental interest of the Chinese. It is obviously necessary for achieving the great Chinese rejuvenation. . . . China must be unified and obviously will be. . . . If anyone splits Taiwan off from China, China’s military will pay any price to totally defeat them. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/more_iranian_nuclear_cheating_uncovered.html

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors held its quarterly meeting last week. The meeting was one of several events taking place simultaneously that provide outlets for dueling recommendations about how the international community should approach the Iranian regime’s nuclear development and other malign activities.

On Monday, March 1, European political and business leaders met virtually with Iranian counterparts for the Europe-Iran Business Forum, a three-day event sponsored by the European Union and aimed at expanding bilateral trade relations without regard for the unresolved tensions over such matters as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. 

The next day, a news conference organized by the main Iranian opposition exposed new information about a major Iranian nuclear site, called Abadeh. The latest report by the IAEA says that it has found anthropogenic uranium particles at two sites in Iran, including Abadeh in Fars province.

Former US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph and former member of the European Parliament Struan Stevenson also spoke at the press conference.