RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/16/how-to-ensure-a-middle-east-war-in-five-easy-steps/

More than 2,500 rockets have landed in Israel over the past week. Some Arab Israeli citizens are terrorizing Jewish Israelis. Apparently, as the rockets fall, these citizens are to be Arab Islamic nationalists first, and Israelis last—even if they wisely prefer to live on the Israeli rather than the Palestinian side of Israel’s hated wall.

The usual Hamas sympathizers are promising death to the Jews on social media (so much for the idea that Twitter and Facebook are “shocked, shocked” by impolite expressions of the Trumpian sort). 

Iran is always Iran—hubristic and chest-thumping that an obsequious United States will ease sanctions, allowing billions of dollars into the country, and thus empowering Iran to revive former levels of funding to Hezbollah and Hamas, to restructure the terrorist weaponry pipeline to Yemen, and to sanctify the Iran-deal trajectory to an Iranian bomb. Tehran just issued a third-rate video of the Republican Guard destroying the U.S. Capitol, apparently to show the world how it plans to humiliate an appeasing Biden State Department.

But why all this violence now? Of course, experts say the pretexts are cancellations of elections in the West Bank. And there is the need for the corrupt Palestinian Authority to find an enemy to scapegoat other than corrupt rival Hamas. Of course, they say, the Jews are—for the 1,000th time—“desecrating” the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and that the Israeli government is in a mess of disunity, without a unified majority voice. Of course, they say, there is the pretext of a court case over former pre-1947 property in Jerusalem—a bitter, but nevertheless still mostly private matter handled by the courts for years without an intifada.  

Yet between 2017 and 2021 there was relatively little violence in Israel and on the West Bank. Whatever our ideologies and politics, we all know the one reason why there is chaos now and not then. And that constant in itself is a primer on the Middle East. 

Trump Provoked Peace 

The Trump Administration assumed that whenever there is perceived distance between the United States and democratic Israel, then unsavory players exploit the void and try things they otherwise would not. Israel’s enemies and even neutrals in the area see such a reset as encouragement to move in, on the assumption (correctly held) that American tensions with Israel always reflect weakness and hesitancy to be exploited.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17348/china-containment-policy

“Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re going to stand up and defend it.” — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, 60 Minutes interview, May 2, 2021.

For American diplomacy, this is a significant admission that America no longer wants to lead the world, but instead gracefully back away as the world’s reigning superpower.

The Chinese communists in Beijing, however, are not known for either subtlety or nuance in how they handle their affairs in their own backyard. Where China is concerned, words and statements matter. Weakness displayed is weakness exploited.

To win the Cold War in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s genius was to go further than simple containment. Reagan believed a simple containment policy would always leave you on defense. He compared it to getting possession of the football and punting on first down.

So the leaders of the free world should not only be speaking – and acting – in opposition to China’s human rights abuses and expansionist, aggressive movements internationally. They should be attacking the worst, most vicious exponent of Leninism – the Chinese Communist Party – as the cause of the human rights problems and global instability that we see in the world.

It is by design and for keeps.

In various recent interviews, President Joe Biden and his top diplomat have tried to say they want China to follow “the rules” while it pushes past the United States as the dominant power in the world. That is the only way to see the signals they are sending to the Beijing regime.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Norah O’Donnell of CBS News’ 60 Minutes last week that the goal of the Biden administration was not to “contain” China, but to protect a “rules-based order” in international relations:

“Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re going to stand up and defend it.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17351/america-playing-with-fire

The Nazi’s were obsessed with race. They suppressed dissent, controlled the dissemination of news and controlled culture. In 1933, the German Student Union started to burn books in an effort to align German arts and culture with Nazi ideas. Books of authors such as Hemingway, Helen Keller and Jack London were considered dangerous and had to be “canceled.” The students did not see themselves as suppressing culture; they saw themselves as advancing a just culture.

“The first thing every totalitarian regime does, along with confiscation and mutilation of reality, is confiscation of history and confiscation of culture. I think they all happen almost simultaneously.” — Iranian professor and author Azar Nafisi, whose book Reading Lolita in Tehran was canceled in Iran.

What used to be unimaginable is now taking place in America. We see certain aspects of totalitarianism in the United States: the obsession with race, declaring an ethnic group collectively guilty, shaming, humiliations based on ethnicity, lootings, arson, racist violence, intimidation of opponents, cancel culture, controlled dissemination of news, and indoctrination of children in schools. We see fake news, conspiracy theories, an overhaul of history, a new language imposed, and unprosecuted theft. All in the name of a more just culture.

On May 8, 1945, men and women rushed to the streets of New York, London and Moscow to hug, kiss and dance. Germany had just surrendered. The war against Nazi Germany was over. The killing had stopped. A great evil had ended. Yet many had mixed feelings of joy and grief. More than 100,000 US soldiers had given their lives and almost another 450,000 had been wounded. In all, 15 to 20 million Europeans had been killed. May 8 is still celebrated in our times as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/10/america-needs-an-honest-debate-about-red-lines-in-defense-of-taiwan/

The greatest present challenge facing America and its allies is arguably a small democratic island off the coast of the biggest rising naval hegemon. Detached historians might see an amusing parallel from ancient Greek history, but history has rarely been kind to small islands caught in the middle of a great-power rivalry. The same argument has now reached Washington D.C., as China embarks on one of the fastest and largest naval build-ups in human history.

Charles Glaser writes for Foreign Affairs that China is geographically poised to take Taiwan if it so desires, yet defending Taiwan militarily is a fool’s errand — impossible to do without an uncomfortable, civilization-destroying cost. According to Glaser, the defense of Taiwan isn’t imperative to the balance of power in Asia, and unlike other allies — such as Japan and Australia — Taiwan is uncomfortably placed in a region where geography gives China an advantage.

That said, in a war the United States might be able to prevail, but the cost of that would be unbearable to generations who have no idea what a genuine great power war might look like. Therefore, Glaser argues that America shouldn’t tie its fate to Taiwan or promise to do something it cannot. Countering Glaser’s assessment in Foreign Policy, Blake Herzinger accuses Glaser of Chamberlain-esque appeasement, arguing that if the United States abandons Taiwan, all hope is lost.

Their debate frames the situation in simplistic Manichean terms, providing only two options: complete abandonment of Taiwan, or catastrophic war mounted in Taiwan’s defense. Yet such bifurcation is flawed, not least of which because it fails to mention a whole host of additional options, from deterrence by a vigorous arming of Taiwan, or by “bleeding” China by way of asymmetric escalation.

Yet the balance of power in place for the last three decades is, unfortunately, unlikely to hold. As scholarly literature suggests, the relative power difference between China and the United States has changed since the early 1990s. As such, any debate about Taiwan should start with these three questions.