HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

BLOCKCHAIN FOR GOVERNMENT: A CHEAT SHEET BY CHUCK BROOKS AND DAVID LOGSDON

Posted By on July 8th, 2017

Chuck Brooks serves as vice president for government relations and marketing for Sutherland Government Solutions and as chairman of the CompTIA New and Emerging Technologies Committee.

David Logsdon is the senior director of public advocacy for CompTIA.

The General Services Administration recently announced its plans to accept quotes from companies for implementing blockchain and other automated machine-learning technologies to enhance GSA’s Multiple Award Schedules FASt Lane program. The program focus is to speed up the process review time for adding products and services to contract vehicles.

The RFQ states, “GSA seeks to intelligently automate the current MAS FASt Lane contract proposal review processes by utilizing distributed ledger technology, automated machine learning, and/or artificial intelligence based technologies.”

Also, on July 18, the U.S. Federal Blockchain Forum, a program of GSA’s Emerging Citizen Technology program, organized in partnership with the Secretary of State’s Office of Global Partnerships and GSA’s Office of Information Technology Category, will be hosting a ground-breaking event. The event will:

Develop, share and discuss practical use cases for blockchain technology among federal government missions.
Identify resource, policy and compliance needs for the effective and efficient evaluation and implementation of blockchain technology in the federal government.
Develop a U.S. Federal Blockchain Atlas and road map for the next six months on how agencies can collaborate to achieve our goals and support the creation of shared services for blockchain technology.

What is Blockchain?

In a nutshell, blockchain is a technology and process for managing data and digital assets. It can be characterized as a public decentralized and distributed ledger technology that records historical transactions of any asset or currency. It functions as a peer-to-peer community network via a consensus-driven process. It is the technology behind cryptocurrencies.

Blockchain acts both as the information and the conduit. It also creates an audit trail that makes it appealing for reconciliation purposes of historical records, transactions and regulations that will impact a whole host of future government functions and services.

Most importantly, blockchain can offer government transparency and better efficiency.

A new white paper, “Realizing the Potential of Blockchain,” published by the World Economic Forum provides a good overview of the implications of blockchain for both the public and private sectors. The paper states that “blockchain appears likely to transform a number of important industries that supply or rely upon third-party assurance. It could prove to be a broader force for transparency and integrity in society, including in the fight against bribery and corruption. It could also lead to extensive changes in supply chains and governmental functions.”

The paper further says blockchain’s ability to generate unprecedented opportunities to create and trade value in society will lead to a generational shift from an internet of information to a new-generation internet of value.

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EDWARD CLINE: THE FRAUD OF FAITH

Posted By on July 8th, 2017

“The main question here should be: Given Islam’s 14 00 year, rapacious, murderous rampage among Muslims themselves (the Sunnis vs. the Shi’ites and various Islamic sub-groups) and against the West, why would anyone want to save it as a “great” faith? Given Islam’s sociopathic and nihilist nature, how can it be called “great”?

Recently, a leading, pro-Brexit, and articulate critic of the European Union confessed that he has “faith”: Faith in what? In the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful Deity. To judge by the encounters I’ve had with Christians (I do not have many discussions with Jews or Muslims on the subject of God), faith for people is a form of unquestionable certitude – almost synonymous with certainty – as an emotional means of knowing the truth about God etc. thanks to their unexamined feelings. Too likely their faith in the existence or condition of something not in the real world undercuts their profession of being reality-oriented. “I know that capitalism works and sets men free and that Britain can only become stronger if it leaves the EU.” How does he know that? Is his epistemology and metaphysics poisoned by faith? The mental compartmentalization of his faith and the real, of the provable or demonstratable of the real versus the unprovable, makes his fealty to reality untenable.

The position of most people is: “What else is there but faith in the Almighty, in miracles, in God’s goodness, and the sublime imperative handed down by God to treat all men as brothers? God created the universe, and everything. Sure, reason has its place in man’s existence but it must keep to its place – we’re not saying that doing the Hokey Pokey will start a car’s engine, in lieu of simply turning the ignition key – however , that is the limit of reason, logic, and of what we call cause and effect. Reason and reality are not substitutes for faith,” they aver with fervor. “The evidence of the senses and reason should not be the paramount measures of authentic knowledge.” So, they say; if the emotion is real and strong enough, so must be the object of that emotion.

An unexamined, spontaneous emotional appraisal is a dangerous thing. If one feels that something is true or right, then it must be true or right. What often stuns me is to meet someone who is otherwise completely rational and reality-oriented and then to hear him admit, in passing or unintentionally, that he believes in a Deity, or in a lucky rabbit’s foot. Faith in the reality of the non-existent and unprovable, to say nothing of the acceptance as “divine” handwork of the contradictory a (such as the destructive handiwork of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions), becomes a substitute for knowledge.

Emotions are not causeless, rootless, or inexplicable. Love is not blind. Nor is hate. Even indifference to an artwork, a person, or thing, as a pre-conceptual appraisal, has an emotional base. An emotion is partly a physiological response to one’s values, or to non-values, to likes or dislikes, to attractions or fear. It is closely linked to the excitation of the nervous system, in various states and strengths, depending on the appraisal of the value seen and responded to; but it is a value one is responding to. It just does not well up within one, causelessly; the cause must be discovered and examined because it always has one. Rational introspection is a key to “knowing” whether or not one’s appraisal of a person or thing is correct or anchored in reality.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP’S AGENDA TODAY BY LIZ SHIELD

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

Good Friday Morning.

Here is what’s on President Trump’s agenda today:

In the morning, President Donald J. Trump will attend the G-20 Summit Leaders’ Retreat.
In the afternoon, the President will participate in an expanded meeting with President Peña Nieto of Mexico. The President will then join the G-20 Summit Leaders Working Lunch.
Later in the afternoon, the President will attend the G-20 Summit Leaders’ Working Session II.
The President will then participate in an expanded meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. IT’S HAPPENING!
In the evening, the President will attend the G-20 Summit Reception.
The President will then attend the G-20 Summit Concert.
Later in the evening, the President will attend the G-20 Summit Social Dinner.

Trump to meet RUSSIAN Putin today

Or perhaps they will “reunite,” if you get your news from CNN. The meeting will take place during the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The New York Times says the meeting will be a win-win for Putin.

Whatever the outcome of the encounter on Friday — which will be on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting of world leaders in Hamburg, Germany, but is expected to overshadow it — the Kremlin is betting that Mr. Putin can stage-manage the event so that he comes out looking like the stronger party.

If nothing much emerges from the meeting, analysts said, the Kremlin can repeat the standard Russian line that Mr. Trump is weak, hamstrung by domestic politics.

But if Mr. Trump agrees to work with Mr. Putin despite a list of Russian transgressions beginning with the annexation of Crimea and ending with its interference in the 2016 presidential election, he will also look weak while Mr. Putin can claim that he reconstructed the relationship.

“It is a win-win situation for Putin,” said Andrei V. Kolesnikov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Whatever Russia hopes to get from the meeting, the fake news stories about RUSSIAN hacking will loom over the discussions.

The Kremlin is aware that Trump critics will be watching for further signs that the American leader is soft on Russia. “Trump is being accused of cooperating with Russia, so if he makes any concessions to Moscow, these accusations will gain strength,” said Aleksei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.

The Kremlin has watched, chagrined, as the Trump administration has rolled back various positions stated during the campaign — his questioning of the viability of NATO, for example, or his expressions of sympathy for the Russian position on Crimea.

“The Kremlin is astonished that the president cannot behave like a real president, like ours, so what can they do in this situation?” Mr. Kolesnikov asked.

Commentary in the official Russian news media suggested that Moscow was baffled by the lack of a confirmed agenda, while various senior officials and the Kremlin press service have listed possible talking points that cover virtually every major international issue.

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New data from Sweden is a dire warning to women against voting for more refugees from Muslim countries.

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

DANGEROUS REFUGEES: Afghans 79 TIMES More Likely to RAPEhttps://www.10news.one/dangerous-refugees-afghans-79-times-more-likely-to-rape/

New data from Sweden shows how immigration and refugees from Islamic countries puts especially women in danger.

92 percent of all severe rapes (violent rapes) are committed by migrants and refugees. 100 percent of all attack rapes (where victim and attacker had no previous contact) are committed by that same group. In other words, thousands of Swedish women would not have been raped and thereby traumatized for life, had it not been for the influx from Islamic countries.

The top-10 list over rapists’ national back ground shows only one non-Islamic country (Chile). Most rapists have Iraqi back ground, followed by refugees and migrants from Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine, Chile and Kosovo.

When taking into account the number of people from the different nationalities in Sweden, Afghans are 79 times more likely to commit a sexual crime than people born from Swedish citizens.

Also read: Driving instructor: “If it wasn’t Ramadan, I would have F**CKED THE SH*T out of you”

Last year Peter Springare, a Swedish police officer, broke the political correct silence on the rape epidemy in the liberal-feminist governed Sweden.

“Here is, what I have been handling last week: rape, rape, severe rape, attack rape, extortion, extortion, violence, illegal threats, violence against the police, threats against the police, drug dealing, severe drug dealing, attempted murder, rape, extortion, and violence.”

Springare also published the criminals’ nationality:

“The criminals’ country of origin: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria, Somalia, unknown country, unknown country, Sweden. With half of the suspects we do not know the country of origin because they have no valid papers. This usually means that they are lying about their nationality and identity.”

Also read: Father “honor rapes” daugther’s boyfriend

Other Western European countries are experiencing similar challenges to womens’ security. Since Denmark caved to UN pressure in 2015 and started taking in thousands of asylum seekers from Islamic countries, rapes soared 163 percent in just one year.

On New Year 2015, thousands of sexual crimes was committed in Cologne, Germany, and other major European cities by Muslim migrants and asylum seekers.

100 percent of attack rapes in Oslo are committed by foreign men, often asylum seekers. According to Norwegian police, the many rapes happen because the men are raised in a culture that promotes such behaviour:

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A “New History” and Old Facts By Uri Bar-Joseph | Summer 2017 Fifty years after the conflict, Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East attempts to upend our understanding of the hostilities.

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

In his new history of the 1967 conflict, Guy Laron claims to upend previous scholarship by arguing that the conflict was precipitated by war-mongering generals in Egypt, Syria, and Israel; in the last case, these militarists were in cahoots with “settlers” with whom they shared an obsession with territorial expansion. Meanwhile, the pressure of economic problems in Egypt and Israel left President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol without the political clout to rein in their respective generals. Reviewing the book, Uri Bar-Joseph finds it disorganized, crammed with “too much information about too many irrelevant issues,” and “filled with factual errors,” some of which “show an alarming lack of expertise.” But the book’s real problem lies elsewhere:

Laron’s principal contribution is to advance a narrative so poorly substantiated as to border on conspiracy theory. . . . [It] is based on a biased selection of previously published sources, mostly in Hebrew and thus beyond the independent assessment of most American and European scholars. Anyone familiar with the documentary evidence will instantly recognize his account as groundless. . . .

After Israel was compelled to withdraw from the Sinai in 1957, there was a consensus within the military that acquiring territory was no longer a viable option. . . . [T]he IDF’s goal was simply to compel Syria to stop providing a base for Palestinian terrorists. . . .

But if Israel had no plans to occupy and annex the Golan Heights, why did the IDF prepare only offensive plans for a possible war against Syria? . . . [T]he answer has far less to do with territorial expansion than with Israel’s military doctrine. Due to the country’s small size and severe lack of strategic depth before the 1967 war, this doctrine called for preemptive strikes and, whenever possible, immediately taking the fight into enemy territory. . . .

[Meanwhile], Egyptian accounts reveal that Nasser’s generals also believed that they were not ready for war and objected to [his decision] to close the Straits of Tiran.

In short, what led to war was not the aims of Israeli and Egyptian generals but the Egyptian president’s decision to close the straits and remilitarize the Sinai.

In May 15, 1967, Israel’s long-simmering border conflict with Syria and its PLO clients came to a boil when the Soviet Union falsely warned Syria and Egypt that Israel was about to carry out a large-scale attack on the Golan Heights. In response, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt advanced his army into the Sinai, which had been de facto demilitarized since the end of the 1956 Sinai-Suez War. A few days later, emboldened by waves of popular indignation across the Arab world, Nasser expelled the UN Emergency Force from the Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, thus blocking Israel’s maritime access to the Indian Ocean through its southern port of Eilat. Taken together, Nasser’s actions created the sense of an imminent, existential threat to the State of Israel. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s government regarded the actions as cause for war.

American attempts to defuse the crisis led nowhere, and, once Syria and Jordan (with the material support of other Arab states) joined Nasser, Israel had no choice but to strike first. Its surprise air attack against Egypt’s air force on the morning of June 5 lasted three hours and destroyed most of it, giving Israel air dominance as the IDF launched its ground forces into the Sinai—an offensive that lasted four days and ended with the devastation of the Egyptian army and the occupation of the entire peninsula. At the same time, and in response to shelling by Jordanian artillery, the IDF launched an attack that ended in three days with the occupation of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. Finally, Israel took the Golan Heights, in a battle that ended six days after the war began.

This, at least, is the story that has been told and retold by the authors of both older and more recent accounts, and it is this story that Guy Laron attempts to upend by placing it in the larger context of Israel’s military plans in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the region. The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East, which Yale University Press brought out shortly before the recent 50th anniversary of the war, is an attempt to thoroughly revise our historical understanding of the conflict.

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Asking China to ‘Fix’ North Korea Is a Waste of Time by John R. Bolton

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

American and South Korean officials have said for over a year that North Korea would be able, within a very short time, to miniaturize a nuclear device, mount it on an intercontinental ballistic missile and hit the continental United States. The country’s test launch Tuesday didn’t conclusively demonstrate that Pyongyang has reached this point, but Alaska and Hawaii might already be within range — and US forces in South Korea and Japan certainly are.

This isn’t the first time the North has marked the Fourth with fireworks. On July 4, 2006, a North Korean short-range missile barrage broke a seven-year moratorium, stemming from a 1998 Taepo-Dong missile launch that landed in the Pacific east of Japan. Tokyo responded angrily, leading Pyongyang to declare the moratorium (though it continued static-rocket testing), ironically gaining a propaganda victory.

In addition, the North substantially increased ballistic-missile cooperation with Iran, begun earlier in the decade, a logical choice since both countries were relying upon the same Soviet-era Scud missile technology, and because their missile objectives were the same: acquiring delivery capabilities for nuclear warheads.

This longstanding cooperation on delivery systems, almost certainly mirrored in comparable cooperation on nuclear weapons, is one reason North Korea threatens not only the United States and East Asia, but the entire world. In strategic terms, this threat is already here. Unfortunately, we should have realized its seriousness decades ago to prevent it from maturing.

A South Korean navy ship fires a missile during a drill aimed to counter North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile test, on July 6, 2017 in East Sea, South Korea. (Photo by South Korean Defense Ministry via Getty Images)

It’s clear that nearly 25 years of diplomatic efforts, even when accompanied by economic sanctions, have failed. President Trump seemed to continue the “carrots and sticks” approach, first with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and more recently during South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s Washington visit.

As he has said subsequently, however, we must shift to a more productive approach. China has been playing the United States while doing next to nothing to reverse the North’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Indeed, there’s every reason to believe Beijing has at best turned a blind eye to willful violations of international sanctions and its own commitments, allowing Chinese enterprises and individuals to enable Pyongyang.

In response, many contend we should impose economic sanctions against China, pressuring it to pressure North Korea. While superficially attractive, this policy will inevitably fail.

Because, however, the failure will take time to become evident, sanctioning China will simply buy still more time for Pyongyang to advance its programs.

China’s economy is so large that targeted sanctions against named individuals and institutions can have only minimal consequences. They will also suffer the common fate of such sanctions, being very easily evaded by establishing “cut outs” carrying on precisely the same activities under new names.

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Eastern Europe Chooses to Keep Western Civilization by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

“The greatest difference is that in Europe, politics and religion have been separated from one another, but in the case of Islam it is religion that determines politics” — Zoltan Balog, Hungary’s Minister for Human Resources.

It is no coincidence that President Donald Trump chose Poland, a country that fought both Nazism and Communism, to call on the West to show a little willingness in its existential fight against the new totalitarianism: radical Islam.

“Possessing weapons is one thing, and possessing the will to use them is another thing altogether”. — Professor William Kilpatrick, Boston College.

In a historic speech to an enthusiastic Polish crowd before the meeting of the G20 Summit leaders, US President Donald Trump described the West’s battle against “radical Islamic terrorism” as the way to protect “our civilization and our way of life”. Trump asked if the West had the will to survive:

“Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

Trump’s question might find an answer in Eastern Europe, where he chose to deliver his powerful speech.

President Donald Trump gives a speech in Warsaw, Poland, in front of the monument commemorating the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, on July 6, 2017. (Image source: The White House)

After an Islamist suicide-bomber murdered 22 concert-goers in Manchester, including two Poles, Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydło, said that Poland would not be “blackmailed” into accepting thousands of refugees under the European Union’s quota system. She urged Polish lawmakers to safeguard the country and Europe from the scourges of Islamist terrorism and cultural suicide:

“Where are you headed, Europe? Rise from your knees and from your lethargy, or you will be crying over your children every day”.

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A whole new ballgame : Amb. David Friedman’s momentous address by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman delivered a speech this week that made the ‎unbearably hot and humid weather feel like a breath of fresh air. At the annual Fourth of July ‎celebration, held Monday evening at his official residence in Herzliya, Friedman not only ‎reiterated his personal faith in Judaism and the Jewish people, but stressed America’s ‎‎”unbreakable bond” with the Jewish state.‎

The bond Friedman was referring to had become so fragile during former U.S. President Barack ‎Obama’s two terms in office that it became the punchline of a joke made in 2014 by comedian ‎Jay Leno. Obama, Leno quipped, knows just how unbreakable the U.S.-Israel bond is, “since ‎he’s been trying to break it for years.”‎

It was not only Friedman’s address that was crafted to convey the loud and clear message that ‎the new administration in Washington is going to behave differently — that it is and will continue ‎to be unequivocally and unflinchingly on Israel’s side. The fact that he was the first U.S. ‎ambassador to invite settler leaders to the event, and proudly pose for photographs with them, ‎already spoke volumes.‎

Friedman began by recounting that the first time he hosted a party in Israel was at the Western ‎Wall in Jerusalem, when he was 13. “As the son of a rabbi of modest means, I can assure you that ‎my bar mitzvah party bore absolutely no resemblance to the party that we are attending here ‎tonight,” he said. “But the spirit … is exactly the same. It is the spirit of patriotic Americans ‎committed to increasing the ties and enhancing the relationship between the United States and ‎the State of Israel. That’s what my family stood for 45 years ago, and that’s still who we are ‎today.” ‎

That right off the bat he boasted of his Jewish connection to the Western Wall in the context of ‎U.S.-Israel relations was highly significant. It signaled to those supporters of President Donald ‎Trump who became disillusioned by what appeared to be a backtracking of his vow to move the ‎U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that this is not a case of yet another administration ‎reneging on its promises in an attempt to appease the Palestinians and impose a peace deal on ‎Israel. It also indicated to Israel’s enemies that America recognizes Israeli sovereignty over its ‎capital city. ‎

Friedman went on to say, “It was just two months ago that I had the honor … to be the master of ‎ceremonies at the very first party ever hosted by the White House to commemorate Israel’s ‎Independence Day, [where] I had the privilege to proclaim, ‘yom haatzmaut sameach l’medinat ‎yisrael’ — ‘Happy Independence Day to the State of Israel.’ Today, it is my great pleasure to return ‎the favor from 6,000 miles away. And so let me proclaim, ‘yom haatzmaut sameach l’artzot ‎habrit,’ ‘Happy Independence Day to the United States.'” ‎

And then he quoted, in Hebrew, a line from Psalm 118 — “This is a day that the Lord has made; ‎let us [be glad and] rejoice in it” — to make a point about Israel’s being “the source of many of the ‎Judeo-Christian values that spawned the American enterprise.” He invoked the famous Puritan Pilgrim John Winthrop, who in 1963 “implored his followers to be faithful to the teachings of ‎the Jewish prophet, Micah, to ‘do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God,'” and told ‎new immigrants to America that if they did so, they would “find that the God of Israel is among ‎us.” ‎

He said that when Winthrop “referred to New England as a ‘city upon a hill with the eyes of all ‎people upon us,” he was also referring to Jerusalem. Indeed, Friedman added, “So much of who ‎we are derives from the teachings of ancient Israel. And, perhaps for that reason, it is no surprise ‎that the United States and Israel have the most special of special relationships.”‎

Here, again, Friedman purposely spoke of Jerusalem, emphasizing that the success and mutual ‎admiration that America and the Jewish state enjoy emanate from “ancient Israel.”‎

‎”We have, of course, common enemies that unite us,” he said — as well as military, trade, culture ‎and cybersecurity cooperation. “But our collective core, what fundamentally unites us, is that we ‎are the two shining cities on a hill, drawn together by a shared history, shared values and … a ‎shared destiny of continued greatness.”‎

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Bosnia: They’re at It Again The Russians are stirring up trouble in the Balkans, threatening the Dayton Accords. By Seth Cropsey & Kevin Truitte

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

For more than a decade now, Vladimir Putin has sought to reverse what he called in 2005 the “major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century,” that is, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Playing a very weak economic hand as oil prices fell, and beset by major demographic problems and an aging Soviet-era military, Putin has done quite well. At minimal risk, he invaded Georgia, and he keeps it under his thumb today using economic, military, and diplomatic pressure. Energy remains an important tool for Moscow; a recent agreement allows Russia to pipe natural gas through Georgia to Russia-friendly Armenia.

Russia seized the Crimea, continues military operations in Eastern Ukraine, and is the major power in the Black Sea, from which it has projected power into the Middle East. Russian arms and support have prolonged Syria’s civil war and all but assured the brutal Syrian dictator’s throne. To the north, Putin threatens the Baltic states with cyberattacks, the possibility of quick and mass mobilizations, and propaganda aimed at dividing ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers within those States.

Traced on a map, Russia’s influence is an incomplete parabola that reaches from the Black Sea through the Eastern Mediterranean and curves northeast into the Baltic Sea. Moscow is now meddling in the Balkans. If it is successful in restarting the ethnic/religious disputes there, the unfinished parabola that Russia has carved since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power will be completed with major influence that reaches its western vertex in the Balkan heart of central Europe. A cordon sanitaire this is not, yet; but Putin’s aims are clear.

Russian tampering in the Balkans goes back centuries. In their struggles with the Ottomans, Russia aided Serb rebels with arms in the 19th century. Russian “volunteers” for the Slav cause and its mobilization in the face of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s declaration of war against Serbia in July 1914 helped ignite World War I. The pattern of Russia’s behavior in the Balkans has not changed.

Political tensions are rising in Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than two decades removed from the country’s bloody, ethnically fueled war and the collapse of Yugoslavia, the divided country is experiencing a resurgence in separatist rhetoric from Bosnian Serbs in the Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s autonomous Serbian enclave. Separatist talk is certain to push Bosnian Croats toward Zagreb and increase the fragility of the Dayton Accords, the 1995 arrangement that established the Republika Srpska as an autonomous part of Bosnia and ended the Balkans conflict. There’s a good reason “Balkanization” has entered our vocabulary as a description of splintering states. Russian involvement has helped inflame the Serbs’ resentment toward their neighbors. Increased instability in the Balkans challenges the NATO alliance, threatens the European Union, and offers Vladimir Putin another low-cost option to stick it to the West.

Specifically, Russia has increased its public support of Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republika Srpska, who has called for a referendum on independence within the Serbian-majority region of Bosnia. In September 2016, Dodik held a referendum in Republika Srpska that reestablished January 9 as a day of celebration for the region’s 1992 declaration of “independence” from Bosnia. Dodik held the referendum, which won 99.8 percent of the vote in the region, in defiance of a ruling by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Constitutional Court that it discriminated against non-Serb citizens. The international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, declared the September 2016 referendum to be both “illegal and unconstitutional.”

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Trump’s Poland Speech: A Call for Preserving Western Civilization The president’s speech went beyond affirming a commitment to America’s NATO allies. By Jeff Cimmino

Posted By on July 7th, 2017

It was not so long ago that the president dismissed NATO as “obsolete.” President Trump’s campaign promise of an “America First” foreign policy spurred some to fear an America turned inward, shunning the post-World War II international order and its concomitant transatlantic commitments.

In a speech on Thursday, however, Trump seemed to lay to rest any notions of a drastic rebalance. Poland will receive Patriot missile-defense systems from the United States, a departure from President Obama’s policy and a move sure to rankle Russian president Vladimir Putin. Arguably as notable as this was how Trump transformed his prior concerns about NATO into a hopeful, yet still cautious, message for uniting Europe in defense of Western civilization:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

Instead of just enumerating common threats like radical Islamist terrorism or even Russian aggression in Ukraine, Trump appealed to the European soul. After painting a portrait of Poland as a longsuffering, but unbreakable, nation, he asked for renewed resolve from the rest of the continent:

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means, but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.

He also asserted that the United States stands with Europe in the quest to preserve a common civilizational heritage:

We must work together to confront forces, whether they come inside or out, from the south or the east, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.