RUTHFULLY YOURS

After the events of last weekend, when the Hezbollah flag was raised in London, spending an evening at a rally with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) seemed positively benign. How wrong I was.

08 July 2016. Richmond Terrace, London SW1A. An area directly opposite Downing Street that is used for demonstrations. It is two years since the 2014 Israel–Hamas conflict, and today the PSC dusted off their ‘stop the attack’ banners, and came out to protest.

But it isn’t 2014 anymore. It was staged to be a big event. It was an anniversary, it was advertised heavily by the PSC minions, their ‘interim head honcho’ Sarah Apps was there, as were their other ‘chiefs’. By half time I heard conversations amongst the organisers making excuses for the low turnout. Scores of banners were left by the sidewalk, with not enough hands to raise them all aloft

A fact about the state of pro-Palestinian activism is this: More people turned out for the Hezbollah Flag than for this PSC anniversary. There were 170, maybe 200. The Facebook event page suggests 557. It seems lots of those that did attend have multiple accounts on Facebook.

I did learn that I need to take my disguise up to another level. I was wearing a hat and a large Keffiyeh, but was ‘clocked’ as soon as I entered. The PSC and I have history, I am passive, I am an ‘investigative journalist’ and they don’t like what I write. A ‘persona non grata’ they can do little about.

The pro-Israelis were taken to one side by the police. Unmasked now, I saw one of them was Joseph and realised this was an Israel Advocacy Movement (IAM) action. Andrew was there, Ben, Chloé, Micha and perhaps a couple of others.
The Israeli flags

The police formed a line between the two groups and the IAM crowd took out their Israeli flags. On the one side a mob of angry anti-Israeli activists, on the other 5 people with the courage to face them.

The distance between the two groups was negligible. A woman by my side ducked and lunged towards the Israeli group, but was stopped and pushed back. Lighter in hand, it seemed she had wanted to burn an Israeli flag. Looking back over the footage, I saw that the lighter had been placed in her hand only during the confrontation. She never made it through the line of stewards.

There was verbal abuse and a stand-off. More distance was placed between the two sides and the organisers tried to bring people back to the rally. There were still people talking on the stage, microphone in hand, but almost nobody was listening. The mob was where the action was. Hating a Jew clearly far more enticing than listening to the same old rhetoric.

Islam can provide a powerful language and tool to commit the worst crimes, while at the same time the perpetrators of those attacks feel blessed, privileged, rewarded and on the winning side.

This indoctrination evolves into a deep-seated fear of even questioning, let alone leaving, the rules of Allah and Islam. Once you become the slave of Islam, it kills your courage to leave it.

Unless we gain a better understanding of the nature of Islam — its reliance on Qur’anic verses, as well as its values, principles and ideology, we will not be capable of addressing this threat.

Simply stating that Islam does not have to do anything with these violent acts is not a constructive; it is just a way to avoid tackling the problem. As Muslims, we need to accept the fact that there exist some parts in the religion of Islam that gives social, political, religious, and cultural legitimacy to violence. Otherwise these Islamist groups would not have flourished.

It is sometimes important to talk about things that are tempting to be silent about. It is important to shed light on the intricacies, complexities, and nuances of the religion of Islam as well as the contemporary social, political and economic traditions linked to this faith and the uncontrolled rise of extremism.

I used to be a devout follower of Islam: one of the few who actually read the Qur’an word for word and tried to follow the rules in detail.

The penalty for renouncing Islam, it is also crucial to note, is death. It is legally administered in Islamic societies by governments, Islamic courts, and even individual Muslims who desire to fulfill their duty prescribed by Allah, the Qur’an and Muhammad.

These Islamic laws, of course, create fear about telling the true story.

A Muslim, you see, believes that the Qur’an contains the exact words of Allah. The Qu’ran does not tell stories about God, as does the Bible; it is viewed as the very word of God, similar to the Ten Commandments. They therefore must be implemented without reservation, regardless of time and place.

According to some Islamic teachings, the reward for killing an unbeliever or apostate — someone who leaves Islam and renounces Allah and Muhammad — will receive the best place in heaven.

If you have been indoctrinated by Islam from your earliest childhood and all your life have been a follower of Islam, abandoning or criticizing it is not going to be easy. This indoctrination evolves into a deep-seated fear of even questioning, let alone leaving, the rules of Allah and Islam. Once you become the slave of Islam, it kills your courage to leave it.

Deciding to be free and independent — liberating yourself from being the slave of the rules of Allah and the chains of Islam — becomes inconceivable, out of question.

Islam can provide a powerful language and tool to commit the worst crimes, while at the same time the perpetrators of those attacks feel blessed, privileged, rewarded and on the winning side.

Unless we gain a better understanding of the nature of Islam — its reliance on Qur’anic verses, as well as its values, principles and ideology, we will not be capable of addressing this threat. The challenge before us is no longer just a Muslim issue belonging solely to the citizens of Muslim countries. The threads of fear and cruelty in Islam infest every country. It is a challenge that needs to be dealt with by everyone, the whole world. Otherwise, Islam will only continue to spread in various forms: al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Jubhat Al Nusra, Hamas, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Islamic Jihad, individual terrorists, and many others.

Recent reports leave no doubt as to cooperation between Hamas and ISIS groups in Sinai. These reports, the Egyptians and Palestinian Authority argue, provide further evidence that the Gaza Strip remains a major base for various jihadi terror groups that pose a real threat.

The report said that terrorists wanted by the Egyptian authorities were admitted to the Gaza Strip hospital in return for weapons given to Hamas by the Islamic State in the Sinai.

Mahmoud Abbas and the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) can continue to talk all they want about a Palestinian state that would be established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. But when ISIS-inspired groups are active in Gaza and there are no signs that the Hamas regime is weakening, it is rather difficult to imagine a Palestinian state.

The jihadi groups clearly seek to create an Islamic emirate combining the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Abbas might thank Israel for its presence in the West Bank — a presence that allows him and his government to be something other than infidel cannon fodder for the jihadis.

Hamas denies it up and down. Nonetheless, there are growing signs that the Islamist movement, which is based in the Gaza Strip, is continuing to cooperate with other jihadi terror groups that are affiliated with Islamic State (ISIS), especially those that have been operating in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai in recent years.

This cooperation, according to Palestinian Authority security sources, is the main reason behind the ongoing tensions between the Egyptian authorities and Hamas. These tensions have prompted the Egyptians to keep the Rafah border crossing mostly closed since 2013, trapping tens of thousands of Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip.

In 2015, the Egyptians opened the Rafah terminal for a total of twenty-one days to allow humanitarian cases and those holding foreign nationalities to leave or enter the Gaza Strip.

This year so far, Rafah has been open for a total of twenty-eight days. Sources in the Gaza Strip say there are about 30,000 humanitarian cases that need to leave immediately. They include dozens of university students who haven’t been able to go back to their universities abroad and some 4,000 patients in need of urgent medical treatment.

Surprisingly, last week the Egyptians opened the Rafah terminal for five days in a row, allowing more than 4,500 Palestinians to leave and enter the Gaza Strip. The unusual gesture came on the eve of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr. However, the terminal was closed again at the beginning of the feast on July 6.

The renewed closure of the Rafah terminal coincided with reports that efforts to end the tensions between Hamas and Egypt hit a snag. According to the reports, the Egyptian authorities decided to cancel a planned visit to Cairo by senior Hamas officials. The decision to cancel the visit, the reports said, came in the wake of the dissatisfaction of the Egyptians with the way Hamas has been handling security along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The closure of the border crossing came as a blow to Hamas’s efforts to patch up its differences with Egypt and pave the way for easing severe travel restrictions imposed by Cairo on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The U.S. military said Sunday it transferred a Yemeni detainee to Italy from the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The transfer of Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman to Italy was announced as a search is under way in Latin America for former Syrian detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was resettled in Uruguay in 2014 along with five other prisoners. He was reported missing by Uruguayan officials last week and appears to have fled the country.

Mr. Suleiman, the Yemeni detainee, was approved for transfer six years ago. He had been in Guantanamo for 14 years and had never been charged with a crime. Mr. Suleiman had been suspected of fighting with al Qaeda in Afghanistan against U.S. and coalition forces and had a history of hunger striking, according to leaked military documents about the detainees.

The transfer of the Yemeni detainee brings the prison’s population down to 78, including 28 approved for transfer.

Defending the Obama administration’s policy last week in front of lawmakers, the State Department’s envoy for closing the Guantanamo detention center, Lee Wolosky, said transfers are made only after the U.S. secures assurances that the receiving country will provide “a security framework that we assess will substantially mitigate the threat a detainee may pose after transfer.”

Mr. Suleiman’s transfer was approved by six U.S. agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Department notifies Congress of the moves 30 days in advance.

“The United States is grateful to the government of Italy for its humanitarian gesture and willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,” the Pentagon said in a statement. Italian officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Republicans reiterated their opposition to Mr. Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantanamo, citing Mr. Dhiab’s disappearance as evidence that some countries are ill-prepared to accommodate detainees. Both Republicans and Democrats said they were frustrated that Uruguay couldn’t account for Mr. Dhiab’s whereabouts. CONTINUE AT SITE

“The fiercest arguments we have in parliament are over Israel.” These words, spoken by the chairman of the Dutch Foreign Affairs Committee, startled me. But they failed to faze the other committee members from the both the left and right. On the contrary, they all readily agreed. In the end, only I displayed surprise.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your country is in economic crisis, tens of thousands of refugees are massing on your borders, and the EU may be unraveling, and yet the issue that most occupies you is…Israel?”

My hosts unanimously nodded. However shocking, the conversation was by no means unusual. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee in Israel’s Knesset, I frequently meet with European legislators.

Whether Dutch or Belgian or German, they all report the same phenomenon. Israel—more than security, more than refugees, and the economy—sparks their bitterest debates. And each time I hear this, I find myself astonished. At stake, I realize, is not Israel’s identity but the Europeans’. For them, the Jewish State is exactly that, a state of Jews against whom the West is once again defining itself.

So it has been for more than two thousand years. The ancient Hellenic and Roman worlds, challenged theologically by a Judaism that rejected their polytheism and the divinity of kings, and threatened demographically by burgeoning Jewish populations, designated the Jews as the ultimate Other.

The first large-scale pogroms and expulsions took place in Rome and Alexandria well before the birth of Christianity. “How could one consider admitting such a people to citizenship or allowing them political rights?” Apion, a first century anti-Semite, wrote. “The Alexandrians were right in detesting the Jews.” By the early second century, Alexandria’s Jewish community, once a million-members strong, had all but vanished.

It is hard to expel junior members for crimes no worse than those committed by the leader of their party.

That two anti-Semitic incidents had occurred at the launch of this whitewash — one from Corbyn himself in which he seemed to compare Israel with ISIS, and another in which a Jewish Labour MP felt bullied into leaving — apparently was just the tip of the problem.

It is finished. The last attempt to instil a portion of decency into the party of the British left is over. The party of the UK left — the Labour party — has now returned to precisely the position it was in before its recent racism row. It has investigated itself, found itself innocent and now reappointed the figure who kicked the whole row off.

Gatestone readers have been able to follow this from the start. After Jeremy Corbyn’s shock election as Labour party leader last year, in November we covered the “new racism” that came — and would increasingly come — from a party that had just elected a man who has called Hamas and Hezbollah ‘friends’ and who has spent a lifetime palling up with the worst anti-Semites and anti-Western bigots on the planet. The election of such a man, we predicted, would have consequences.

Then in February of this year, when the Labour Club at Oxford University turned out to be overrun by barely disguised and largely open anti-Semitism, we suggested that the rot of this party had surely started “from the top.” It is hard to expel junior members for crimes no worse than those committed by the leader of their party.

In March we covered the growing tolerance within the party for the spread of anti-Semitic tropes and the dominance of anti-Semitic types. Parliamentary candidate Vicky Kirby had previously been suspended from the Labour party for tweeting about Jews having “big noses” and about Adolf Hitler being the “Zionist god” and similar less-than-attractive outpourings. Under Mr Corbyn’s leadership, Ms Kirby was reinstated and became the vice-chair of her party’s local chapter.

Then in May came the beginning of the big scandal — the one that looked finally, perhaps, even likely to move Jeremy Corbyn from his position. At the end of April, a string of scandals had occurred all in precisely the same area. Naz Shah — an MP for Bradford — was found to have spread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages on Facebook and other social media. These included a suggestion that the Jews of Israel all be forcibly deported and sent to America. At the same time, Labour MP Rupa Huq appeared to try to justify, and then swiftly step back, from endorsing such sentiments and a set of Muslim Labour councillors were suspended for anti-Semitic outbursts.

The Obama Era opened with his Cairo speech, in which he embraced Muslims in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. He planned to depose the secular dictators and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus Gadhafi, Mubarak and Assad were marked for removal in that order. The EU was on board.

After supporting the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood headed by Mohamed Morsi, he backed the takeover of Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood in collaboration with the newly Islamist Turkey, headed by Recep Tayyid Erdogan, extolling him as his best friend.

Simultaneously, beginning in 2009, he reached out to Iran. He wanted to embrace it as an ally rather than to designate it as an enemy. His efforts culminated in the disastrous Iran Deal, which provided a tail wind to Iran’s hegemonic ambitions. He overlooked the fact that Iran was a long standing ally of Assad’s and was fighting to resist his removal, which was Obama’s stated goal.

Obama’s reach exceeded his grasp.

Libya, sans Gadhafi, is in chaos. The Egyptian military under Gen al Sisi is in power. He indicted Morsi for treason and banned Muslim Brotherhood again. Obama called his takeover of power a coup thus preventing the US from supporting him. Russia and Saudi Arabia have moved in to take up some of the slack.

Even though Turkey, the Gulf States and the Muslim Brotherhood shared his goal of removing Assad, they have not succeeded due entirely to Obama’s lack of leadership and unwillingness to fight. His removal of the last of the US military forces in Iraq and his willingness to have Iran manage Iraq gave rise to ISIS. Turkey and the Gulf states in different ways supported ISIS, which was Sunni and was seen as a proxy to stop Iran expansionism and topple Assad. The US over time began to see ISIS as a bigger threat than Assad and began to support the Kurds, who they originally shunned, so that they would fight ISIS. They did this even though Turkey was adamantly opposed.

Obama announced that if Assad used chemical weapons, that he would be crossing America’s red line. Rather than enforce that red line, he seized on a lifeline that Russia offered, namely, to work to remove the chemical weapons with the cooperation of Assad. This was a major turning point in the war, as Russia proceeded to take on a greater role in the fighting with America’s blessing, thereby enabling Syria to stabilize and go on the offensive. Russia was not so much interested in defeating ISIS as they were in stabilizing Assad and taking back some territory.

Meanwhile Obama’s plan to have the Muslim Brotherhood with the backing of Turkey replace Assad is no longer operative. The Muslim Brotherhood as a player in Syria is no longer discussed, let alone active. Turkey, who started out with grandiose ambitions to recreating the Ottoman Empire and assuming the mantel of Sunni leadership, has abandoned such ambitions and is working to contain the self-inflicted damage its policies have caused.

Erdogan’s embrace of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood has strained relations with Egypt, who has banned them and is actively fighting them. Egypt is also partnering with Israel to neutralize and contain Hamas in Gaza and all insurgents in Sinai.

Obama’s bellicose statements and actions regarding Cyprus have resulted in new alliance between it and Israel based on their mutual interest in defending and developing their new found gas reserves. Greece too has joined that alliance.

Erdogan has enraged the Russian bear by shooting down one of its fighter planes. As a result, Russia has imposed sanctions on Turkey and is supporting the Kurds who are an anathema to Turkey.

Erdogan started out trying to reconcile with Turkey’s Kurdish population but ended up fighting them instead, in addition to fighting the Syrian Kurds that the US was supporting. Along the way they alienated ISIS, who they were supporting. Now both ISIS and the Turkish Kurds are committing terrorist atrocities against them.

All this has given rise to a new Middle East.

A widely-publicised Iftar dinner, intended to show that Malcolm Turnbull gets what it means to be inclusive, ended badly after he was advised that one of his guests, Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, had taught that Islam prescribes death for adulterers, and homosexuals spread diseases. No rogue maverick, Australian-born Alsuleiman is the elected national president of the Australian National Imams Council.

Although insisting that “mutual respect is absolutely critical,” Turnbull subjected this prominent Muslim leader to public humiliation. He regretted inviting him to dinner and counselled the sheikh “to reflect on what he has said and recant.” In the middle of an election, wanting to limit fallout from the dinner-gone-wrong, held only days after the Orlando massacre, Turnbull stated that his no-longer-welcome guest’s views are “wrong, unacceptable, and I condemn them.”

Well, Mr. Turnbull may deplore Alsuleiman’s teachings, but the real challenge is that these were not merely his personal views. The sheikh’s teachings on homosexuality and adultery reflect the mainstream position of Islam, preached by many a Muslim scholar around the world today. Telling a sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.

Western leaders pretend that the objectionable teachings of Muslim faith leaders are personal faults.

Many Australian Muslims will be disappointed at the treatment meted out to Sheikh Alsuleiman. An event designed to honour the Muslim community ended up providing a platform to denigrate one of their most respected leaders for promoting Islamic doctrines. Several Australian Muslim leaders have since dug in their heels to affirm support for the sharia position on homosexuals. So much for recanting.

While Turnbull refused to pass judgement on Islam itself, saying “there are different views of different issues, as there are in all religions,” he also sent a message that he is prepared to disparage Australian Muslims’ religious beliefs. It was a bitter pill for Muslims to swallow that this came in the form of a humiliating invite-to-disavow game of bait-and-switch, conducted during a pre-election media storm.

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

You only really know Paris when you know the Métro. When you recognise the Roma rapping on La Ligne 13, when you know without needing to look which stations let the sleeping bags in at night, when you get that instinctive feel for the hour the homeless beggars do their rounds up and down the carriages — “Mesdames, Messieurs.”

You only really know Paris when you know the spots where women look behind themselves at night. Get out quickly from the tunnels at Stalingrad — watch out for your bag, they say, that’s where the Eritreans are sleeping. Don’t get yourself a commute on La Ligne 13, they joke, it may be light blue but it goes from Romania to the banlieue end of hell. And with this ticket this is where I am going. I have to see the new France for myself to ask: is this country in danger? This is not just any old question to me. This is about my family.

My aunt lives on La Ligne 13. She, like most of my family is French. French and Jewish. She lives in the Paris that the tourists think can never change. But this is not the France we knew. Outside her apartment on the pavement someone has spray-painted in black “Too Many Arabs”, while inside our family has been arguing. Le Bataclan, les banlieues, Marine Le Pen, burnt police cars, jihadi assassinations, the HyperCacher — do we smell smoke?

If we get one more failed president then Marine Le Pen will win the presidency, says my uncle. My aunt wants a British passport. This is hysteria! Let’s be calm, tuts my cousin. But the killings have already started, says his wife. Round and round it goes. Optimists, turning into pessimists, and back again. Are we paranoid? I am on the Métro to find out.

A swirl of purple and blue light glows out of the rose windows of the cathedral of Saint-Denis and spills mystery over the silence of the nave. I am standing in a sacred necropolis: the burial place of the kings of France. Tombs surround me. Carved out of limestone, their faces calm, they look as ifthey are sleeping. The crypt holds their bones, from Dagobert I all the way to Louis XIII. This is the line of the Sun King. A man lies here who was not a king: Charles Martel, the Frankish warrior who Gibbon believed had saved Christendom by defeating the Arab invasion of France on the battlefield near Poitiers in 732.

Two hundred metres away, it is time for Friday prayers. The mosque is overflowing. Every week 3,000 believers come to pray here on Rue de la Boulangerie, in a dingy space that cannot hold more than 1,800. In tracksuits, jubbah, and the white tunics of Islamists it overflows. The road is crowded, blocked, as around a hundred fall to their knees towards Mecca. These hardline mosques are building a parallel Paris: segregated by faith.

I am only 20 minutes from my aunt’s flat on Ligne 13. This is Sunday morning. At the cathedral I count scarcely 500 faithful at Mass. They are almost all black. “This is a black church,” says the old white priest as I leave. Imagine Westminster Abbey in Tower Hamlets, a Tower Hamlets without jobs, which makes it more of a Bradford. This is the banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis. In a country where ethno-religious statistics are illegal, this is seen as a Muslim-majority territory. To mention Saint-Denis is to start arguing about France’s greatest tension: Islam and the Republic.

Bradford upsets the British less than Saint-Denis does the French. France has a far more virulent rejection of Muslim multiculturalism. The majority even find Islam itself incompatible with the values of French society. The word communitaire is only used with sharply negative connotations. This is because Saint-Denis clashes with the underlying French ideology — La République, the enlightenment scheme whereby there should be nothing between the will of a uniform, secular state and its citizens. No priests, no imams, no community elders.

Last week one of the cathedral’s priests was savagely beaten here, thugs mistaking a long thin book for an iPad. Then they bolted, leaving him with a bleeding nose on the square. My notebook fills with stories like this: of thieves, hoodlums and pickpockets. This is nothing like poor London.

The streets of Saint-Denis talk as if the authorities have lost their grip. Jihadists are waging a dirty war on the Republic, recruiting intensively in these banlieues. Since 2012, stabbings, shootings and car rammings have taken place every few months, punctuated by slaughters such as Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan.

It was here after the Bataclan massacre that the police stormed the hideout of the terrorist mastermind, firing 5,000 rounds. Three jihadis were shot dead, minutes from the cathedral. Their stated ambition was to start a civil war.

The odd woman circumvents France’s ban on complete face coverings, by wearing a little anti-bacterial facemask under tight-fitting hijab. The Catholic faithful drifting out of the cathedral are uncomfortable. “Everything has changed,” says Maria, a 62-year-old cleaner. “Immigration changed everything. The people changed. You can just see it for yourself. The French have all left Saint-Denis. Look around you.” She has lived here for 37 years. “The real French have left. I’m a Portuguese immigrant, and I want to leave too. It’s their own fault they let themselves get screwed like this. But now France is no longer France.”

The square is full of drug pushers, hustling in broad light. They are brazen in a way unthinkable in London. Dishevelled Arab men hawk parsley and fennel out of cardboard boxes where the escalators grind out from the Métro. A Roma beggar without one arm but instead three deformed fingers sprouting from her shoulder stump, chimes “Salaam Aleikum” at the hijabis outside a poky Islamic clothes shop.

The West has developed reasonable-sounding rationales for not acting in the face of what is clearly aggression by big powers. That inaction has bought peace, but the peace has never been more than temporary.

Officials in Beijing and Moscow believe their countries should be bigger than they are today. Faced with little or no resistance, China and Russia are succeeding in redrawing their borders by force.

Should we be concerned by a nuclear-armed, hostile state falling apart? Of course, but we should be more worried by a hostile state launching nuclear attacks on the Baltics, as the Kremlin has repeatedly threatened to do.

The Chinese and Russians may be villains, but it is we, through inaction, who have permitted them to be villainous. The choice is no longer risk versus no risk. The choice is which awful risk to assume.

Speaking in April at the Aspen Security Forum in London, Douglas Lute, Washington’s permanent representative to NATO, said:

“So essentially there is a sense that, yes, there is a new more assertive, maybe even more aggressive Russia, but that fundamentally Russia is a state in decline. We have conversations in NATO headquarters about states in decline and arrive at two fundamental models: states in rapid decline which typically lead to chaos and breakdown, and states in gradual decline. Then we ask ourselves: Which of these two tracks would we rather have our nearest, most militarily capable neighbor, with thousands of nuclear weapons, move along? To many, trying to manage Russia’s decline seems more attractive than a failed state of that size and magnitude right on the border of NATO.”

Lute explained why the West adopted clearly inadequate measures to stop Russia after its seizure of Crimea and portions of Donbass. As the thoughtful diplomat explains, “it may not make sense to push further now and maybe even—and maybe accelerate or destabilize that decline.”

If we do not act because Russia is weak, then how do we explain the West’s China policies? China, in the estimation of almost all policymakers and analysts, is not on the way down. On the contrary, they believe it is ascendant.

By now, they also know that Beijing is increasingly aggressive. China grabbed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines four years ago. Since then, it has attempted to seize another South China Sea feature, Second Thomas Shoal, also from Manila, and the Senkaku Islands, in the East China Sea, from Japan. The Chinese military has, without justification, closed off portions of the international waters of, and airspace over, the South China Sea. Chinese authorities, virtually without consultation, declared an air-defense identification zone, which included the sovereign airspace of Japan, over the East China Sea. China’s generals have repeatedly sent their troops deep into Indian-controlled territory at various spots in the Himalayas.

And our response? That has been to continue “engagement” of the Chinese regime, helping to strengthen its economy and institutions and integrate it into multilateral organizations. The concept is that, at some point, Beijing will enmesh itself into the international community and accept global norms. Most everyone believes that if China has a stake in the world, it will help defend the existing system.