Never in the history of American foreign policy has so much egg adhered to so little face as in the matter of Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. All of America’s allies, including Britain and Australia, have elected to join the Chinese-led institution. That is a grand validation of China’s One Belt/One Road vision for infrastructure upgrades across the whole Eurasian landmass. China’s President Xi Jinping envisions $2.5 trillion of trade between his country and the “Silk Road” nations over the next decade. Rather than fret about the impact of a slowing (or shrinking) world economy on China’s export-driven prosperity, China is seeking to shape the economic environment around it.
I share the legitimate concerns of center-right critics over the gravely delusive and dangerous concessions the Obama Administration appears hell-bent to agree upon in its nuclear negotiations with Iran:
giving an international imprimatur to Iran’s so-called “right” to enrich uranium, with the maintenance of ~6500 centrifuges, including perhaps 600 in the concrete-reinforced, 300 foot subterranean Fordow facility;
simultaneous “quick” economic sanctions relief, and even a partial lifting of existing embargoes on arms sales to the Islamic Republic;
the exclusion of Iran’s robust ballistic missile (BM) program, which, per mid-March Senate testimony by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency Director, Navy Vice Admiral James Syring, could have intercontinental (IC) capability this (i.e., 2015) calendar year [note: a satellite image published January, 2015 purports to show a 27-meter tall Iranian ICBM just outside Tehran];
the steadfast refusal by Iran—despite repeated, ongoing International Atomic Energy Agency demands—to reveal its record of putative military nuclear development/ weaponization experiments.
After weeks of escalating criticism of Israel by the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender, on Sunday called for the renewal of the “special” relationship between the US and the Jewish state.
In a telephone conversation with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Clinton said that she “thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.”
Gaming the demise of the Saudi monarchy has been a flourishing industry on the think-tank circuit for the past dozen years. Not long ago I sat in private conclaves of US national security officials with a sprinkling of invited experts where the head-shaking, chin-pulling consensus held that the Saudi royal family would be gone in ten years. A premise of the “realist” view that American policy in the region should shift towards Iran was that the Saudi monarchy would collapse and Sunni power along with it. All of us misunderestimated the Saudis.
Now the Saudis have emerged at the top of a Sunni coalition against Iran–limited for the moment to the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, to be sure, but nonetheless the most impressive piece of diplomacy in the Sunni world since Nasser, and perhaps in modern times. That attributes a lot of importance to a coalition assembled for a minor matter in a small country, but it may be the start of something important: the self-assertion of the Sunni world in response to the collapse of American regional power, the threat of Sunni jihadist insurgencies, and the Shi’ite bid for regional hegemony.
A most peculiar crisis is developing for the Chinese economy – and, indeed, for the regime — while the world’s attention is riveted on the chaos and terror in the Mideast and Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Not the smallest element is the clever manipulation by Beijing’s strategists of the world’s hopes for continued remarkable Chinese growth as a last call instrument to bail out a dawdling world economy.
That misapprehension of China’s economic capacities may well forestall, again, at least for a time, an inevitable coming to grips with basic problems of it vast society under the Communist Party monopoly. But there is growing evidence that China’s financial problems have reached a crescendo that Beijing can no longer manage.
The Romance of the Confederacy
It’s time the South dropped it in favor of a better part of its heritage. This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments re Texas’s refusal to allow Confederate flags to be stamped on license plates as part of a “Sons of Confederate Veterans” design. I wouldn’t ask sons of Confederate veterans to disown their ancestry; in fact, my mother’s mother’s family was Southern, and four of my great-great-grandfathers fought in the Confederate army. And I know that lots of Americans sincerely see the Confederate flag as a symbol of states’ rights — particularly because virtually no Confederate soldiers actually owned slaves.
But, personally, I see the Confederate flag as the symbol of men who, as Lincoln put it, wrung their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; who, “to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” slavery, were willing to “rend the Union, even by war.” And I’m a very reasonable man. “Both parties” to the Civil War, said Lincoln, “deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” That war killed about three-quarters of a million Americans, and the Stars and Bars are the symbol of the men responsible — regardless of its having also been a symbol of men who were just trying to defend their homes.
Needless to say, the South has lots to be proud of, and — though it might not be my place — I’d like to point out something that could (and ought to) supplant its traditional reverence for the Confederacy. The best estimates of the size of the Confederate army range from 750,000 men to a million. One hundred ten thousand additional Southerners fought in the Civil War — for the Union. That means that more than one of every ten Southerners who fought in the war fought to end slavery and keep the country united.
It is entirely possible that there is a clause in the agreement that parallels the Kennedy Doctrine, except that it is aimed against Israel.Israel and the United States need to get ready to thwart a terrible surprise.
At the moment there no such thing as an Obama Doctrine for foreign policy – but one may be coming and it could prove catastrophic.I worry about bringing it up. It might give the President an idea he may have skipped, so it might be best to leave it unspoken.
What does Israel do when it is not Israel but Iran that has America’s back?But we must approach the subject, like it or not, because the possibilities are staggering. In fact, I’d be surprised if it were not already the central part of the deal being manufactured between Obama and the ayatollahs toward an agreement that is entirely favorable to Iran regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
Among the most colossal shifts of our time has been the rise of China, from the black hole of Mao’s ruinous communism, to a power increasingly to be reckoned with around the globe.
But what is today’s China? Is it still communist? Capitalist? Is it friend or foe to the U.S.? Should we fear China’s rise? Resist it? Welcome it? What lies ahead?
These are the big questions tackled by PJTV in a special in-depth series of video reports: “Made in China.” Hosted by PJTV’s Bill Whittle, with Scott Ott, this is a three-part exploration of what China has become, where it came from, and what might lie ahead. You can watch a trailer, and purchase it here [1].
The troublesome truth is that there is no apartheid in Israel. Israel allows Arabs and Muslims full human and civil rights in all areas of life, including as full members of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset.
To brand Israel as an apartheid state when none of these restrictions exist is not only defamatory propaganda but, according to the black South African Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, trivializes the real suffering of blacks under apartheid.
While Tutu et al discuss Israel the “oppressor,” Israel’s surrounding enemies seek to obliterate it in accordance with their genocidal charter. Given the silence of Tutu et al on that subject, apparently an agenda of genocide is not seen by them as an injustice.
Tutu also disregards the countless Christians being slaughtered in Muslim states; that black slaves are still being held in Muslim states such as Mauritania; the forcible taking of “infidel” slaves by Boko Haram and ISIS; the racist genocide in Darfur and the 10 million Muslims slaughtered by other Muslims since 1948.
It’s a phrase endlessly repeated since 1989. It’s been on the lips of Western diplomats, especially our own State Department types, for a quarter century: “Two-State Solution.” We must have a Roadmap to Peace and that destination must embrace a state for the Israelis and a state for the Arabs of Palestine. Anyone who questions that formulation is in danger of being marginalized. How can you oppose what Secretaries of State of both great American political parties have embraced? How can you say there are any people on earth who are not entitled to a state?
Are the Druze entitled to a state? Are the Kurds entitled to a state? How about the Chaldean or Assyrian Christians? It would seem that the state of Syria, ruled by the minority Alawites, is falling apart. What else do most Arab “states” in that region do?
The Libyans have a state. How does their state look these days? Everything would be better, they said, if only that bad man, Qaddafi, were overthrown. Hillary Clinton famously cackled on national TV when Qaddafi was killed by a vengeful mob of his fellow Libyans in 2011. Qaddafi was behind the terrorist bombing of an American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. But the junta that replaced Qaddafi in Tripoli announced that Qaddafi had been wrong to turn over to Scottish authorities the man who actually planted that bomb. Do Qaddafi’s even worse successors deserve a state? It would seem now, three and a half years after Qaddafi’s bloody death, that Libya is falling apart.
