RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Surely no statesman in modern times … has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of America’s bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected.

Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissinger’s 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 “Paris Peace Accords” after which America’s naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.

Henry Kissinger’s luminous career was punctuated by one great disappointment, namely his failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet system and the downfall of the foreign-policy system to which he devoted his life. That’s on par with the old joke: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Kissinger was more hedgehog than fox: The fox knows many things, said Archilochus, but the hedgehog knows one important thing. Kissinger knew one important thing, which had the sole defect of being wrong. Like the Bourbons, Dr. Kissinger has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as he showed in an Oct. 16 essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Kissinger bewails “disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order” and wishes to restore it.

As Angelo Codevilla argued on this site in his review of a new Kissinger biography, the great man took as dogmatic truth that the Cold War was unwinnable, and thus “’the goal of war can no longer be military victory,’ but rather to achieve ‘certain political conditions that are fully understood by the other side,’ and that to this end, the U.S would ‘present (the enemy) at every point with an opportunity for a settlement.’”

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, told the first meeting of his national security team, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.” He and his advisors–Richard Allen, William Clark, William J. Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and then-younger men like Angelo Codevilla, Herbert Meyer and Norman Bailey–saw a sea-change when it stared them in the face.

President Obama had several key opportunities to put pressure on the ruling mullahs in the Islamic Republic to free the three American citizens (pastor Saeed Abedini, journalist Jason Rezaian and US Marine Amir Hekmati) who have been held for years in one of Iran’s notorious jails on bogus and baseless charges.

Last week, Jason Rezaian, the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, who has been behind bars in Iran since July 2014, was convicted. An Iranian court has finally handed down a verdict, but it is vague. The verdict comes after 447 days of Mr. Rezaian being in jail — that is three days more than the 444 days that American diplomats were held hostage. For those who argue Iran of 2015 is far different from the revolutionary Iran of 1979, this is a clear-cut example that the Islamic Republic is still the same: Islamist, anti-American, and oppressive.

The Iranian Students’ News Agency quoted Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a hardliner who is a spokesman for Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, as stating that Rezaian had been found guilty. Interestingly, Mr. Mohseni-Ejei, who was the minister of intelligence from 2005 to July 2009, insisted that he did not know the details of the sentence. Really?

Is It Possible to Speak about Culture?

Another populist anti-immigration party in Europe has made a very strong showing in a national election — the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) just won a third of the seats in parliament — and polite society is as always scandalized.

You’d think they’d be getting used to it. It may have happened while Senator Sanders wasn’t looking, but in Denmark, the country that currently serves as a beloved mascot of American progressives, the Danish People’s party took 21 percent of the vote in the 2015 general election, just behind the first-place Social Democrats with 26 percent; in reality, though, that wasn’t a second-place finish for the DPP, which picked up 15 seats while the Social Democrats picked up only three. The big issue for the DPP? Border controls, restrictions on immigration and asylum, and Euroskepticism.

In a pattern that will not be unfamiliar to those following the politics of “welfare chauvinism” — which is traditional welfare-statism fortified with nativism — the DPP’s win came largely at the expense of the free-market Venstre party, which seeks to reduce welfare spending while the DPP promises to increase it.

And so it goes: The anti-immigration, pro-welfare Sweden Democrats won 49 seats in parliament in the 2014 election. The UK Independence party, which was founded to oppose British submission to the European Union, has made immigration its centerpiece domestic concern, with party leader Nigel Farage calling it “the biggest single issue facing this party.” Its electoral clout continues to grow. In France, the National Front had a big year in the 2014 municipal and European elections, taking 25 percent of the vote. A 2015 poll commissioned by the left-leaning magazine Marianne found that National Front leader Marine Le Pen was the favorite to win the first round of the 2017 presidential elections. In the Netherlands, the Dutch Freedom party, which has called for a ban on immigration from Muslim countries, has gone in a few short years from non-existence to third-largest party. In 1993, there was a schism in Jörg Haider’s Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), with a faction objecting to the party’s obsessive and sometimes extreme focus on immigration and nationalism breaking off to form a more conventional free-market party, which was never heard from again, while the FPÖ, now under new leadership, thrives as the third-largest party, lagging its two larger competitors by only a few percentage points in the elections.

TAIPEI—In 1996, when China tried to intimidate voters on Taiwan by firing missiles close to the island, U.S. President Bill Clinton swiftly sent in two aircraft-carrier battle groups. His blunt message to Beijing: back off.

America was at the zenith of its power, while China was virtually defenseless at sea and in the air, so the Pentagon could afford to act with swagger. A conflict, had China been foolish enough to provoke one, would have exposed its chronic military backwardness. Confronted, Beijing was forced to yield.

Today, a gathering crisis in the South China Sea over China’s massive island building underscores how dramatically the military balance has shifted in East Asia, not just over Taiwan but everywhere within reach of Chinese missiles, fighters and submarines. The U.S. isn’t shying away; it is planning a naval challenge any day now around the Spratly Islands, where China has equipped one of its dredged platforms with a runway long enough to land military jets. But the White House has been agonizing for months about the risks.

Don’t expect aircraft carriers. They’re now targets for the world’s first operational antiship ballistic missiles. Besides, shock and awe isn’t part of any rational game plan these days against China, whose military spending has been growing by an annual average of 11% since 1996, narrowing the military gap with America faster than almost anybody thought possible.

Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr, arrested in Saudi Arabia at the age of seventeen, has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion.

Last week, two Saudi human rights activists were sentenced to jail for illegally establishing a human rights organization, questioning the credibility and objectivity of the judiciary, interfering with the Saudi Human Rights Commission (one can imagine what that is like), and describing Saudi Arabia as a police state.

Karl Andree, a 74-year-old British grandfather and a UK citizen who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last year, is due to receive 350 lashes for unpardonable crime of being caught with some homemade wine.

British Justice Minister Michael Gove has now reportedly insisted that the UK could not possibly enter into a contract to train Saudi prison guards.

The naïve Western leaders are those who expect our countries to carry on with “business as usual” with a regime that sentences our citizens to flogging, and that beheads and crucifies political dissidents.

The naïve politicians are those who think the publics of the West do not know what a human rights sewer Saudi Arabia is, or think that we will put up with it. If that were ever the case, that time is over.

Is international opinion on Saudi Arabia finally shifting? For years, one of the great embarrassments and contradictions of Western diplomacy has been the intimacy of the West’s relationship with the House of Saud. Of course, both Britain and America have some responsibility for installing and then maintaining the Saudi royal family in their position. Were it not for this circumstance, in addition to the world’s largest oil reserves, the people we now call the Saudi royal family would be neither richer nor any more famous than any other group of goat-herders in the region.

Kenya’s president told CNN over the weekend that the United States’ pressure on his country to ensure gay rights is not in sync with where his society is.

On his summertime visit to the country, President Obama spoke with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta privately on the issue and publicly in a joint press conference.

“As an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently under the law,” Obama said then. “I’m unequivocal on this.”

“I’ve been consistent all across Africa on this. I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law. The state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation.”

Kenyatta said in an interview aired Sunday that this pressure isn’t taking into account the wishes of Kenyan society.

“Let me make it clear to you, I’ll put it this way. All right? Think first and foremost we’re all saying that whatever society you come from, the principal aim is that you must give the people, you know, their right to choose. Now, where we are, and on the level of development that we are at, I am not saying that these people don’t have their rights. That’s not what I’m saying. I am just saying that the majority, the majority in our society do not wish to legalize this issue of gay rights,” Kenyatta said.

Mama Merkel’s Muslim ‘Migrants’

Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe. Europe’s response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation.

Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe. If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.

– Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban

The crowds are gone from the Keleti central train station, and few middle-eastern faces now appear on the streets of Budapest. But the recent tidal wave of humanity – whether deemed “migrants,” “refugees” or, more accurately, “unarmed invaders” – has left a new resolution implanted in Hungary and, indeed, this part of Europe that once labored under the Muslim yoke. And that impression is: this much and no more.

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization.

Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for shallow things, shallowly. Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure. These beliefs are all very nice, but they are also secondary.

What Europeans no longer believe in are the things from which their beliefs spring: Judaism and Christianity; liberalism and the Enlightenment; martial pride and capability; capitalism and wealth. Still less do they believe in fighting or sacrificing or paying or even arguing for these things. Having ignored and undermined their own foundations, they wonder why their house is coming apart.

What is Europe? It is Greece not Persia; Rome not Carthage; Christendom not the caliphate. These distinctions are fundamental. To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst.

OTTAWA—Canada’s Conservative leader was ousted in a national vote Monday after almost a decade in power, as voter discontent and a souring economy helped the son of long-serving Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sweep into the top office.

Justin Trudeau’s centrist Liberal Party was headed for a majority government, with his party leading in or elected in most districts across the country, after a hard-fought contest with incumbent Stephen Harper. Mr. Harper said last night that he would step down as party leader, after conceding to Mr. Trudeau.

Results from polls in the country’s most-populated regions, Quebec and Ontario, and from Canada’s Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Coast city of Vancouver, showed a wave of Liberal red, marking an impressive victory in Mr. Trudeau’s first campaign as leader. The win represents the first Liberal majority in 15 years. The Conservatives maintained their bedrock support in the resource-rich western provinces, as well as in the bulk of rural Canada.