RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16052/russia-arctic-empire

These Russian claims have not yet been adjudicated by international law courts, the United Nations, or by any bilateral or multilateral treaty.

Russia’s blanket claims of territorial sovereignty pose a direct challenge to “Law of the Sea” conventions such as the “Freedom of Navigation” (FON) principle, championed by the U.S. and other Free World navies.

The aspirations of the five polar nations — Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S. — may also have to contend with the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China.

Perhaps a prudent path for the U.S. and Free World countries to adopt in the Arctic, given Moscow’s comprehensive advance and the China-Russia tandem, would be to maintain its nuclear submarine superiority while closely monitoring Russia’s own Northern Fleet based in the Arctic base of Murmansk. NATO successfully carried out this mission during the Cold War.

Moscow sent a spectacular message last month to the world’s other Arctic powers: Russia is determined to dominate the region. Russian transport aircraft, breaking the record for the highest altitude jump ever, parachuted a group of their Spetsnaz (Special Forces) over the Arctic. from a height of almost 33,000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet). Russian paratroops then executed a military exercise operation before reassembling at the Nagurskoye base, the northernmost military facility in Russia.

Any rival’s attempt to catch up and surpass Moscow’s head start in the Arctic is unlikely to succeed. Russia has a geopolitical advantage in that its sovereign land abuts over half of the Arctic’s territorial waters. Historically, Russia’s czars and commissars were frustrated in their attempts to secure warm-water ports, which would have benefited commerce and military force projection. Now, with environmental warming and subsequent accelerating ice-melt in the Arctic Ocean, Moscow appears poised to control the newest maritime corridor, “the Northeast Passage.” This waterway will unite Russian Europe with Russia’s Far East provinces adjacent to Pacific waters. The “Northeast Passage” could shorten the transshipment of goods from Asian countries to Europe by two weeks, rather than shipping goods through the Suez Canal route.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/29/chinas-communist-regime-shows-its-true-totalitarian-colors/

‘You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” That was Rahm Emanuel’s now-infamous prescription for the Democratic Party following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Now, China’s applying that same dictum globally, as the Wuhan virus ravages nation after nation, freeing Beijing to do its mischief.

For years, Americans of all political stripes operated under the delusion that China, though nominally communist, was becoming more like the West every day. Our massive, but one-sided, trade with the country would bring changes, we thought. An inevitable consumer economy in China would expand, and bring with it ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy.

China would moderate its behavior, the argument went, perhaps eventually easing its military threats against Taiwan, and letting Hong Kong maintain its status as a free-trading city-state outside of Beijing’s direct control.

That was our folly and our delusion, as we’re now finding out.

To begin with, China’s lies at the very beginning of the pandemic show, at best, gross negligence and incompetence, and at worst, intent to murder. As retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently wrote for the Hoover Institution, “Beijing piled lies atop heaps of corpses.”

With the world still distracted by fears of the coronavirus pandemic’s deadly impact and much of the West’s economy shut down, China used the crisis to expand its power by bullying its neighbors, crushing all dissent in Hong Kong, and making not-so-subtle military threats against the U.S.