RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a global contest underway between two economic and political models. One model is liberty and democracy, and the other is state control and totalitarianism. Fortunately (and hopefully not too late), U.S. policymakers have awakened to the nature of the current challenge.

During an October 18 speech about the U.S-India relationship, secretary of state Rex Tillerson sought to build ties with Asian democracies. He argued that “[t]he emerging Delhi-Washington strategic partnership stands upon a shared commitment upholding the rule of law, freedom of navigation, universal values, and free trade” and criticized China’s “predatory economics.”

According to Tillerson, the Chinese government has been lending money to developing countries in a way that gives their victims debt, but not jobs, and sometimes ends up with their assets being owned by China. Specifically, Tillerson said:

We have watched the activities and actions of others in the region, in particular China, and the financing mechanisms it brings to many of these countries [in the Indo-Pacific region] which result in saddling them with enormous levels of debt. They don’t often create the jobs, which infrastructure projects should be tremendous job creators in these economies, but too often, foreign workers are brought in to execute these infrastructure projects. Financing is structured in a way that makes it very difficult for them to obtain future financing, and oftentimes has very subtle triggers in the financing that results in financial default and the conversion of debt to equity.

China’s predatory policies in the Third World are of a piece with its approach to the United States. Like a pusher seeking to entrap an addict, China provides cheap loans and subsidized products in order to achieve long-term objectives, expand its power, and create dependency.

Chinese predatory economics has had similar negative effects upon the United States.

Loans. China has been lending the proceeds of its trade surplus to the U.S. in order to keep the dollar-yuan exchange rate from falling to a trade-balancing level.
Debt. As a result of these loans to the United States, the U.S. owes the Chinese government trillions of dollars. The exact amount is not known, since China lends us money using foreign banks as intermediaries, taking advantage of a tax loophole that Congress should close.
Jobs. American manufacturing workers produce about $120,000’s worth of product each. Thus, if our $320-billion trade deficit with China were balanced, American workers would gain about 2.7 million productive jobs.
Assets. China has been using the proceeds of its trade surpluses with the U.S. to buy up U.S. assets and acquire U.S. technology – literally buying our comparative advantage. We will be paying dividends, rents, and interest to China for generations.
Power. China has displaced or soon will displace (depending upon your metric) the U.S. as the world’s largest economy.

A centerpiece of China’s predatory economic policy toward the United States is an enormous trade imbalance. The graph below shows the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services with China for the year ending with the quarter specified:

Although no one is recommending the horrors of mass-expulsions, little attention has been paid to Rohingya ties to international Islamic terrorism.

The Muslim world’s condemnation of Myanmar should give the West pause before it joins in the widespread criticism of Myanmar. Al-Qaeda’s call “upon all Mujahidin in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines to set out for Burma to help their Muslim brothers” is accompanied with a threat that the Myanmar government “shall be made to taste what our Muslim brothers have tasted.”

In addition to fighting atrocities against innocent people, it is critical to protect the Free World, which, until the Rohingya crisis, Myanmar had made great progress toward joining.

Although the media has extensively covered the Burmese Army’s expulsion of Muslim Rohingya people from Rakhine Province in Myanmar — and although no one is recommending the horrors of mass expulsions — little attention has been paid to Rohingya ties to international Islamic terrorism.

Aided by foreign terrorist networks in Pakistan and support from Rohingya exiles in Arab Gulf States, Myanmar’s Islamists and their foreign backers ultimately may want to establish a sharia state in Rakhine.

Approximately 1.1 million Rohingya live in Rakhine, a coastal province in Myanmar (Burma). Almost all are Muslim; their language closely resembles Bengali, the tongue of Bangladesh, to their north. Some Rohingya have lived in Rakhine since the 15th century. Most, however, trace their residency in Myanmar to the late 19th century, as descendants of Muslim Bengalis who were moved there by British colonial decree.

On August 25, 2017, the Burmese military launched what human rights organizations have called an “ethnic cleansing” campaign — something Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has denied — against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine, a week after Muslim rebels attacked a military base, police barracks, and border guard posts, killing at least 71 people. The attackers were members of the Islamist Arakan Rohingya Salvation Group (ARSA). Some of these operatives likely received training in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied allegations that the country’s security forces launched an “ethnic cleansing” campaign. Pictured: Then U.S. President Barack Obama with Aung San Suu Kyi, in Rangoon, Myanmar, on November 14, 2014. (Image source: U.S. State Department)

According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the Rohingya diaspora in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is also providing financial assistance to their religious cousins in Myanmar. Additionally, many of the more than 50,000 Rohingya émigrés in the United Arab Emirates send back money to their ethnic relations in Myanmar. The Emir of Sharjah in the UAE, Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, also financially supports Myanmar’s Rohingya.

Arab Gulf States, too, grant sanctuary to Islamists from the ethnic Rohingya diaspora. For instance, Ata Ullah, ARSA’s founder, was born to Rohingya exiles in Karachi, Pakistan, before immigrating to Saudi Arabia. There, he created ARSA in 2012, after a series of clashes between the Rohingya and government security forces in Myanmar. But this tension between Rohingya and ethnic Burmese did not originate in contemporary times.

This animosity dates to 1886, when what is today’s Rakhine State was detached from the rest of Burmese territory and incorporated into the British Crown Colony of India. This was the price Britain exacted from Burma after losing two wars against the British Empire.

After the integration of northernmost Burma into India, the British colonial government organized a mass migration of Muslims from the Bengali-dominated region of the sub-continent (today’s Bangladesh) to what is now Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Britain’s decision greatly offended the Burmese, as Myanmar (Burma) had been an overwhelmingly Buddhist state. The migration sparked immediate inter-religious tensions, and subsequent periods of religious warfare.

It’s a topsy-turvy world when an elected leader enforcing a democratic constitution gets accused of staging a coup, but then that’s Catalonia this month. Separatists are furious that Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy might suspend autonomous government and force a new election to resolve a separatist crisis in the northeastern region.

Separatists, led by regional President Carles Puigdemont, claim Catalonia voted for independence from Spain in a referendum this month. No such thing happened. A majority of the minority of Catalans who participated in a publicity stunt dressed up as an election said they want to secede. A constitutional court had ruled the exercise illegal before it happened. It was an attempt at mob rule.

Now Mr. Rajoy wants to protect the rights of the non-secessionist majority. The national Senate will vote Friday on Mr. Rajoy’s plan to invoke a constitutional clause suspending autonomous local government until new elections for a regional parliament can be held, perhaps in six months. In the interim, Madrid would take over responsibility for policing, taxation and most public administration.

It’s a draconian step, but Mr. Rajoy has little choice. The regional government abandoned its obligation to uphold Spain’s constitution when it authorized the phony vote. Mr. Puigdemont claims to want negotiations between Barcelona and Madrid, but he won’t say what he wants to negotiate. He has refused even to say whether he is declaring independence.

Mr. Rajoy owes it to loyal Catalans to call time on this farce. Though he may need to deploy a heavy police presence to quell violent protests, the focus should be on keeping streets safe, schools open and other public services functioning while preparing quickly for regional elections. The courts will weigh sedition prosecutions against individual Catalan officials in some cases. Two local police officials are under investigation for their failures to stop the illegal vote, charges they deny. Madrid should be judicious but not shy about enforcing the laws.

There is nothing undemocratic about this. A duly elected national leader is trying to afford all citizens the protection of the national constitution against a minority of rabble-rousers. The biggest threat to Spain—and to Europe—would be to set a precedent for allowing fake votes to tear real countries apart.

The virtue of Mr. Rajoy’s approach is that it would put Catalan voters firmly back in control, through a legal election. Those voters say they want to remain within Spain but they keep electing separatist local officials, presumably as a protest and on the assumption Madrid would hold the country together anyway. A new ballot offers Catalans a path out of this crisis by taking political responsibility for the union.

Europe has an imperial problem. Put simply, the European Union, formed as a political union to prevent war on the continent, is slowly morphing into a liberal utopian empire, undermining Westphalian nation-states with its open migration policy and fiscal meddling. Inevitably, this has resulted in the rise of pre-Westphalian ethno-nationalist sentiments. The imperial character of the EU has long term ramifications for great maritime powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as for revanchist land powers like Russia. Put simply, the EU imperium, which started as a prospective solution to the problems of a continent ravaged by centuries of war, is now turning out to be the cause of new and predictable troubles.

As Catalonia stands on the brink of secession from Spain after a controversial referendum, with Spain poised to send in troops to restore “constitutional order,” and terrorism and migration on mass scale result in ethno-nationalist backlashes, their is an increasing and urgent need in for policymakers in the United States and the United Kingdom, to engage in a serious reflection upon and reassessment of the character of EU.

The Forces of Ethno-Nationalism

Historically, Europe was never united, either culturally, linguistically, or tribally. The only way Europe was unified, in temporal phases, was through imperium. But those forced attempts at imperium also resulted in nationalist reaction and inevitable backlash. The Romans fell prey to imperial overstretch, which resulted in differing ethnic tribes waging war against the central authority and, eventually, the dissolution of the Roman empire. From Bonaparte to the Habsburgs, Kaiser to Hitler, all of them tried to dominate continental Europe through sheer strength of arms. Similarly, during the last days of the Cold War, contrary to what liberal historians preached for the last quarter century, it was not liberalism that saw off the Soviet empire, but conservative nationalism in Eastern Europe against Soviet imperium. There’s a reason some countries like Poland are skeptical of a European superstate run from Brussels and similar attempts at social engineering through forced migration and settlements. They hear echoes of the past in this attempt to create a new and benign EU-SSR.

The European Union, however, seemed a necessary idea when it started, after years of conflict ravaging the continent. As Churchill wrote, the aim of British foreign policy for 500 years has been to see that there’s no single dominating hegemony or empire in Europe. After the fall of the British empire, the United States carried on the same balancing principle, which resulted in the United States confronting the Soviet Union. The geopolitical logic behind that was simple. Any single hegemon that controls the entire European landmass is bound to be powerful enough, militarily and economically, to dominate other great powers across the globe.

One hundred years ago today (October 24), Lenin’s bolsheviks seized power in Russia and the world has been a worse place ever since. Essays by the gross will be written to observe the anniversary, but Steve Kates at Catallaxy Files sums up the enduring consequences with a minimum of wasted words:

Here is the reality. The socialist left is filled with people whose lives are driven by envy and hatred for the productive, contented and self-reliant. Ruining their lives makes no one better off, other than those who take power … every socialist so-called solution to our existential and economic problems has been disastrous for everyone but those who seize power. Every socialist leader is a Stasi agent lying in wait.

In Ukraine, the locals have unveiled a puckish appraisal of the man whose tyranny and successors killed so many of their forebears. Follow the link below to see the re-casting of Lenin in a role for which he would have been a natural.

It is held to be morally wrong to assert that someone who is a man biologically but a woman by choice and surgery is not genuinely female. Likewise with national identity, but here the problems of transforming, say, Germans into ‘Europeans’ gets somewhat stickier.

Identity politics is the order of the day, it seems, whether you approve of it or not. But what is identity politics? Do we mean the politics of personal identity or sexual identity that we see playing out in America’s universities? Or the politics of national identity versus European identity that we see in the Brexit debate? Or the politics of racial identity throughout the advanced world, including the US and Australia?

About twenty years ago I got very interested in that question, then just beginning to be a political one. It seemed to me that all these different identity disputes offered roughly the same choice: do we think that identity is something that we get handed down to us by our parents, society, sex, class, nation, race, and then take for granted as we grow up? Or is it something we think about and choose voluntarily? It was clear then that a “postmodern” (though it has been in the air for two hundred years) concept of identity was advancing in psychology, the neuro-sciences, the media, the theatre, film, the world of culture generally, and above all in the universities, the intelligentsia, and the young. This was the theory that the self is almost infinitely malleable and that we may choose our identity (or identities) rather than simply receiving them from either our genes or society or wider environment. Its spiritual godfather was David Hume, who wrote:

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.

Consequences flow: if there’s no hard, given core central to our personality, then our identity is malleable, maybe infinitely so, and we can choose several identities on different occasions (as both Pirandello and Woody Allen have suggested, in plays and films like Zelig). Indeed, the principle on which we choose an identity has been laid down by the greatest living American psychologist, Tom Wolfe, in his essay “The Me Decade”. It began life as an advertising slogan: “If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde.” The charm of this principle for constructing a new identity is that it is almost infinitely accommodating. It enables us to say to ourselves: If I have only one life to live, let me live it as … (fill in the blank).

All that sounded highly theoretical when I wrote about it first twenty years ago. I doubt that Hume or Pirandello would have imagined young intellectuals taking their theories to the extent of believing that their sexual identity, indeed their biological identity, was entirely a matter of their own arbitrary choice. (Tom Wolfe is a different matter—he might well have imagined just that.) Yet that is the situation we see today in some of the best universities in America or the world. Moreover, the choice of the identity-bearer, however seemingly arbitrary, is then enforced on his fellows by college administrations that insist we all address him or her by whatever neologism he or she has invented to express their new identities. (This also plays hell with traditional rules of grammar.)

As Richard Neuhaus observed in a different context, “Once orthodoxy is optional, it sooner or later becomes prohibited.” Professors who resist this new fashion in elective identities and continue to refer students as “him” or “her” (and related atrocities) are threatened with serious penalties, including the loss of their positions. This must be an especially tricky judgment for anyone of precise judgment because the rules governing the protection of new identities keep changing and are anyway beset with contradictions.

For instance, it is held to be morally wrong to assert that someone who is a man biologically but a woman by choice and surgery is not genuinely female. At the same time as sexual identity was becoming a voluntary matter, however, sexual orientation was being decreed to be a hard-and-fast certainty that brooks no alteration. Again, it is a secular sin to argue that someone who is gay might be able to change his sexual orientation to a heterosexual one by either religious commitment or psychiatric treatment. Indeed, so-called “reparative therapy” that promises to do just that is now outlawed in some jurisdictions—generally the same jurisdictions that encourage and even finance sex-change operations. Desire is fixed, it seems, but not the object of desire. And Harvey Fierstein’s defiant hymn to a gay identity, “I Am What I Am”, must be replaced by “I’m Not What I Was”.

If personal identities as seemingly fixed as one’s sex are malleable, however, then surely collective identities of nation and religion must be more so. After all, there may be disagreement about the degree to which a personal identity is socially constructed, but there can be no real doubt that a national identity is a social and collective one. That belief was the foundation of several ideologies in the last century that sought to replace the taken-for-granted national identities of Britain, Australia and the US with new post-national identities that looked beyond the nation to new collectivities rooted in ideology—whether ideologies of class or race.

Today we see the same impulse to replace nationhood with something else in the “Europeanism” of the European Union, in multiculturalism, in globalisation and global governance, and even in jihadism (which, viewed from a certain standpoint, is Islam’s umma transformed into a new post-national global identity). These new post-national identities were even seen as “inevitable” since according to German professors, nations and nationalisms were withering away and would need replacement institutions.

Recent elections have shown, however, that ethnic, national and religious identities have revived in Europe and the United States even though the intellectual consensus was that such identities were at best nostalgia and at worse fascism of one kind or another. Brexit, the support for Trump’s “America First” in “the white working class” in America, the rise of what is called “populism” in much of Europe, most significantly the upsurge of anti-immigration sentiment in countries like Germany and Sweden (which had been strongholds of the new intellectual post-nationalism) illustrate the stubborn persistence of traditional identities.

Every so often the United Nations decides to dignify a tyrant, or a tyranny, in ways so in-your-face perverse that it draws public attention, provokes highly embarrasing protest — and the UN scuttles to back away. So it went with the recent decision by the World Health Organization to appoint as one of its goodwill ambassadors the longtime tyrant of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.

On Oct. 18, the director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, of Ethiopia, announced he was “honored” to name Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador. For good measure, Tedros praised Zimbabwe as “a country that places universal health coverage and health promotion at the center of its policies to provide health care to all.”

On Oct. 20, Geneva-based UN Watch put out a press release calling Mugabe’s appointment “sickening,” and noting that Mugabe’s brutal rule had turned Zimbabwe from the breadbasket of Africa into a basketcase, devastating its health care system along the way — while Mugabe went outside the country for his own medical needs. There was plenty of other protest, from the U.S., the UK, medical professionals worldwide, and so forth. On Oct. 22, Tedro announced he was rescinding Mugabe’s appointment.

So… problem solved?

Nope, not by half. For the UN, the embarrassment will likely fade. But the over-arching problem here — of which Mugabe’s fleeting four days as a goodwill ambassador is merely a symption — is a United Nations that inveterately dignifies and honors tyrants and tyrannies, though usually in less prominent fashion.

For a sampling of just how deep this problem runs, take the case of Iran — ruled since 1989 by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This is a regime that President Trump accurately described in his Oct. 13 speech on the Iran nuclear deal as “having raided the wealth of one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant nations, and spread death, destruction, and chaos all around the globe.” Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and leading predator of today’s Middle East, with a record of terrorist bombings and assassinations carried out by its agents and mascot terrorist groups from the Middle East to Latin America to Europe to Asia. Iran’s regime — a longtime client of North Korea’s weapons bazaar — spent years cheating its way around UN sanctions on its rogue nuclear and missile programs, and under the current UN-approved nuclear deal has carried on, with brazen bad faith, testing ballistic missiles. Iran’s regime brutalizes its own citizens, especially women, and in 2009 crushed mass protests by beating and shooting its own people in the streets. Remember the murder of Neda Soltan.

There’s a solid argument to be made that under the UN’s 1945 Charter, which says that membership is open to peace-loving states that respect human rights, today’s Iran does not belong in the UN at all.

But at the UN, Iran’s regime not only enjoys a seat as one of the 193 member states. It also enjoys the privileges of holding seats on a remarkable array of the governing boards of major UN agencies. These are positions less publicly prominent than that of a goodwill ambassador. But they are potentially more influential for directing the funds and activities of these agencies, accessing information, and horse-trading political favors behind the scenes.

Currently, Iran sits on the 36-member board of the UN’s flagship agency, the UN Development Program, or UNDP, which disburses billions annually, and in field offices around the world serves as chief coordinator for other UN agencies, and doubles, when needed, as a representative of the secretary-general. Iran has a clear affinity for the UNDP, where it chaired the governing board in 2009, while under UN sanctions for its rogue nuclear program. CONTINUE AT SITE