Category Archives: Politics – international

Is there a coming war with China?

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David Archibald has been saying this for as long as I can remember. This is from a year ago, from a year ago:

China has built an offshore oil drilling rig, numbered HD-981, specifically for the purpose invalidating other nations’ claims to seabed they thought was theirs. There is no doubt about the purpose of the rig given that a Chinese state oil company official once called it “our mobile national territory.” Its primary purpose isn’t commercial. If China can drill an oil well on some other country’s seabed, they can then claim that it was China’s territory all along. The rig is having its first outing to that purpose off the coast of Vietnam, accompanied by 86 Chinese vessels including a submarine. Vietnam responded by sending 30 coastguard vessels to interfere with the Chinese drilling rig. Ramming of Vietnamese vessels by the Chinese ones has been reported.

Miscalculation might not lead to war because there is nothing miscalculated about what China is doing. China intends to start a war.

As far as Archibald was concerned, this war was inevitable. Then yesterday, we had this at Drudge from The Telegraph in London, US-China war ‘inevitable’ unless Washington drops demands over South China Sea. This is how the story starts:

China has vowed to step up its presence in the South China Sea in a provocative new military white paper, amid warnings that a US-China war is “inevitable” unless Washington drops its objections to Beijing’s activities.

And we are right in the thick of it. From The AFR again yesterday, China using Brazil resources as lever against Australia:

China will use its growing relationship with Brazil to pressure Australia into running a more independent foreign policy, according to analysts and academics, as Beijing seeks to use its economic muscle for strategic influence.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang signed $US50 billion ($63.5 billion) worth of deals during a state visit to Brazil last week, including a loan facility to help iron ore miner Vale increase production.

In a sign that Beijing is increasingly looking towards Brazil for food and mineral commodities, China also pledged to lift a ban on Brazilian beef.

“If Australia gets closer to the United States we will see China increase its purchases from Brazil, while reducing its trade with Australia,” said Wu Xinbo, Dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University.

“The alliance between Australia and the US is a major constraint on the relationship between China and Australia.”

And now today, picked up at Drudge: Japan to join U.S., Australia war games amid growing China tensions.

Japan will join a major U.S.-Australian military exercise for the first time in a sign of growing security links between the three countries as tensions fester over China’s island building in the South China Sea.

While only 40 Japanese officers and soldiers will take part in drills involving 30,000 U.S. and Australian troops in early July, experts said the move showed how Washington wanted to foster cooperation among its security allies in Asia.

It’s a very messy world out there. I hope someone is paying attention.

Ann Coulter on the Decline and Fall of the United States

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adios america ann coulter

51% of those voting in America today will pretend not to know what she means. It is even possible they may not even actually know. The US is on its final lap and it is hard to see how it can survive as anything much better than a Venezuela, although it has a lot more capital left to run down. A decade from now it will be a wreck. The economic slide is of course more than evident, but the cultural and political decline is even more pronounced but is left unstated. When it becomes impossible to say the truth as you see it because a swarm of locusts will arrive to pick your personal status clean so that you never work again, no one says anything because there is no advantage for any individual to throw their future over the cliff on some suicide mission that can achieve absolutely no good at all.

These are quotes that are to be discussed as part of “What Would You Ask Ann Coulter?” with the questioner as likely to be as obtuse as any other left media presenter anywhere.

Here’s a look-back at some of her more…memorable quotes:

“It would be a much better country if women did not vote” May 2003, The Guardian

“I’m more of a man than any liberal” July 2007, to Bill O’Reilly on John Edwards

“Young people are idiots” March 2014, AnnCoulter.com

“Foreigners shouldn’t be allowed on American television” June 2014, discussing the World Cup

“Today’s immigrants aren’t coming here to breathe free, they’re coming to live for free” May 2015, ‘Adios, America‘

UPDATE: The interview with Ann is at the link.

Defending the defensible

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There are many times a year that I think that the only reason I can find that there is a shred of sanity left in the world is by reading Ann Coulter. Here she is, reminding us why we invaded Iraq in the first place. That this world historical victory for the West was actively subverted by GWB’s successor is now part of the historical record, if you can follow the logic of events.

Megan Kelly asked [Jeb] Bush: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”

The correct answer is, according to Ann:

Now that we know that a half-century of Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act would result in a country where a man like Barack Obama could be elected president, and then, purely out of antipathy to America, would withdraw every last troop from Iraq, nullifying America’s victory and plunging the entire region into chaos, no, I would not bother removing dangerous despots in order to make America safer.

Instead, I would dedicate myself to overturning our immigration laws, ending the anchor-baby scam and building a triple-layer fence on the border, so that some future Republican president could invade Iraq without worrying about a foreign-elected president like Obama coming in and giving it away.

The reality is that there is no answer that matters any more. America is sinking and the rest of us are going to have to work out what to do for ourselves.

The devastating Obama legacy

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Barack Obama has done fantastic damage to the US. Two things today. First domestically, from Thomas Sowell who discusses government commandeering of your tax money, which it doesn’t ask for but takes, and to little purpose:

And please don’t call the government’s pouring trillions of tax dollars down a bottomless pit “investment.” Remember the soaring words from Barack Obama, in his early days in the White House, about “investing in the industries of the future”? After Solyndra and other companies in which he “invested” the taxpayers’ money went bankrupt, we haven’t heard those soaring words so much.

The US has also managed to keep unemployment down by making even thinking they might find a job so impossible, that millions have left the job market, while others have been bribed to take up alternative income earning by living off the government “Food Stamps” program. Unemployment rate falls because there are fewer unemployed in the official statistical base.

And then, internationally. This is so incredible, with the most incredible part how silent the media has been, The Fall of Ramadi and Anbar Province to ISIS:

On Monday, a day after the reported fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to Islamic State forces, the Pentagon downplayed the significance of the loss.

“To read too much into this single fight is simply a mistake,” said a Pentagon spokesman.”What this means for our strategy, what this means for today, is simply that we, meaning the coalition and our Iraqi partners, now have to go back and retake Ramadi.”

The reality is much more complicated. Even as the Islamic State takeover of the capital city of Iraq’s largest province seemed nearly complete on Sunday, the Pentagon continued to argue that the situation was still “fluid and contested.” That assessment was countered by reports that “hundreds of police personnel, soldiers and tribal fighters abandoned the city,” leaving it and a “large store” of American weapons in ISIS hands. The BBC cited a statement “purportedly from IS” claiming that the city had been “purged.”

I am now convinced that Drudge has been gotten to in the US since there was one report yesterday and then nothing today about what you would think is the most disturbing event since the War in the Middle East began. This is “Nazis take Stalingrad”. Is the news now so suppressed that it can truly be said that we are at war with Eastasia in alliance with Eurasia, as we have always been, and no one notices a thing?

Salvaging what we can

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There are many mad voters in the US which I define as anyone who voted for Obama twice. But this new blog by Roger Simon, Diary of a Mad Voter, is focused on the next presidential election, which doesn’t happen until November 2016. We will be voting before that, but there is not the same kind of obsessive interest this far out. But we are blessed with a Parliamentary system and do not elect a president.

The post I opened when I got there was by Richard Dreyfuss, yes THAT Richard Dreyfuss. It is about Election Coming: Nobody Knows Anything. Translation, the American voter is so dumbed down by the education system that they are largely too poorly informed to vote in any sensible way.

Our values are not transmitted genetically; they must be taught. They’re not. We’re asked to make choices between political parties that have ceased all rational intentions to communicate their stand on issues with any clarity. We live in an hypnotic trance of inaction because we aren’t taught how to run the nation, that we as a people are the highest sovereign power, that we can and should hold villains accountable.

Voting doesn’t make you a better citizen, comprehending the issues makes you better. Voting without that makes us all suckers.

With Kindergarten versions of fairness now the standard, is it any wonder. Anyway, it is a blogsite you might wish to visit if viewing the American election is of any interest to you.

BTW this was picked up at Powerline. where it is written, “Roger says, that the 2016 election is “THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER!” It’s not. We already had that one in 2012. The next one is just a salvage operation, but repair, I think, is impossible.

Keynes the big loser in UK election

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Here’s a story that I can only hope our local right of centre party takes to heart: The UK Labour party should blame Keynes for their election defeat, written by Niall Ferguson no less. From yesterday’s Financial Times:

Credit where credit is due. Lynton Crosby is getting the plaudits for the Conservative party’s successful election strategy, but the real architect of this victory was surely George Osborne, the chancellor. Leave aside Labour’s collapse in Scotland, arguably the election’s most striking result. In England, the Conservatives won because Mr Osborne was right and his critics were wrong.

The comedian Russell Brand was not alone in having his celebrity endorsement of Labour roundly ignored by the voters. Even more ignominiously humbled were the Keynesian economists who have spent so much of the past five years predicting that the economic consequences of Mr Osborne’s policies would be disastrous.

In the vanguard of the Keynesian attack was Paul Krugman of The New York Times. In August 2011 he denounced the “delusions” of the chancellor whose “experiment in austerity” was “going really, really badly”.

Why? Because, in seeking to bring the government’s deficit under control, Mr Osborne was worrying needlessly about business confidence. “The confidence fairy” was the term Mr Krugman coined to ridicule anyone who argued for fiscal restraint.

Unfortunately for Mr Krugman, the more he talked about the confidence fairy, the more business confidence recovered in the UK. In fact, at no point after May 2010 did it sink back to where it had been throughout the past two years of Gordon Brown’s catastrophic premiership.

Mr Krugman was equally relentless in predicting that austerity would lead to recession; indeed, he insisted that the UK’s economic performance would be worse than during the Great Depression. In April 2012 he warned darkly that Britain would “continue on a death spiral of self-defeating austerity”.

It was, he lamented, a “policy disaster” that would cause a double-dip recession and “cripple the UK economy for many years to come”.

In fact, there was no double-dip recession. The UK had the best performing of the G7 economies last year, with a real gross domestic product growth rate of 2.6 per cent. In 2009, the last full year of Labour government, the figure was minus 4.3 per cent. Moreover, far from being in depression, the UK economy has generated more than 1.9m jobs since May 2010. UK unemployment is now 5.6 per cent, roughly half the rates in Italy and France. Weekly earnings are up by more than 8 per cent; in the private sector, the figure is above 10 per cent. Inflation is below 2 per cent and falling.

I’m not often into book burning but these Keynesian texts, with their Y=C+I+G as the cornerstone of theory and policy, are genuine candidates. If reality actually matters, which it may not actually do, Keynesian theory must now disappear. It is already disappearing from policy. Eventually economic theory must catch up, eventually.

UPDATE: Niall Ferguson has done another similar bit of writing on his blog, which he titles, The Rise and Fall of Krugmania in the UK. But it’s not Krugman, it is Keynes who remains everywhere, just as he did after the “death of Keynes” in the 1980s after the Great Inflation, which could not happen, or at least could not according to Keynesian theory. Report of Keynes’s death are greatly exaggerated, in no small part because no economist can function without aggregate demand by their side.

Thatcher returns?

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Is this a second Thatcher revolution? Unshackled from Coalition partners, Tories get ready to push radical agenda. And radical it is:

David Cameron will use the Conservative Party’s first majority in the House of Commons for nearly 20 years to “deliver” on a radical agenda to cut welfare, shrink the size of the state and re-define Britain’s relationship with Europe.

Conservative insiders said Mr Cameron would move to the right to consolidate support among his backbench MPs after five years of compromise with the Liberal Democrats.

Among Mr Cameron’s first legislative priorities will be to enshrine an EU referendum into law, bring in the so-called ‘snoopers charter’ to give police greater powers to monitor internet communications and give English MPs a veto over legislation only affecting England. The Tories also intend to publish plans to scrap the Human Rights Act within their first 100 days. All proposals had been previously blocked by the Lib Dems. . . .

But the first challenge for Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne will be to put together a comprehensive spending review in the next few months to meet the Tory pledge of eliminating the structural deficit by 2018.

As well as deep welfare cuts The Independent understands that the Department of Business and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, previously run by the Lib Dems, will be among the biggest casualties in terms of spending reductions.

Oliver Letwin, the Tories’ policy chief, has spent the campaign in Whitehall drawing up proposals to merge quangos and slash Government regulation. These are likely to form a key part of the spending review. The review has been made more difficult by Mr Cameron’s late and unexpected election pledge to find an extra £8bn for the NHS. This has yet to be funded and if the Tories stick to their other tax and spending commitments could require further cuts. Most senior Tories had expected to be negotiating another coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats, giving them the flexibility to raise taxes to fund their additional spending commitments. As it is they are now bound to implement legislation binding the Government not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT rates for the next five years.

I had no idea this was the agenda. This is classical economic theory once again at the heart of policy. It will be fantastic to watch if they actually manage to do it.

Sentimentality is no basis for foreign policy

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It was tragic when the plane was shot from the sky over the Ukraine, but it was, as everyone understood, unintended. A war zone is a danger zone, even undeclared wars. But it did worry me that more was being made of it than was warranted. We have much bigger issues, and that particular problem came to an end the very moment it occurred. There was no reason to strain our relations with Russia to such an extent over any of it.

I feel the same about yesterday’s executions in Indonesia. The people I feel most sorry for are their parents who will forever feel that tremendous sense of loss for their children. But we cannot run our foreign policy on such cheap sentimentality. Indonesia executes drug runners. Other countries execute people for other kinds of things, such as conversion to Christianity.

I have found myself dwelling on the deaths in Nepal which are on a very different scale, and these are tragedies that have invaded people’s lives through no actions of their own. I don’t wish execution on anyone, but that is the law of their land. For us, other issues matter more.

W attacks O – enough is finally enough

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George W. Bush is a man of principle, and one of his principles was to leave his successor to get on with governing. None of his predecessors had been as fastidious, but finally, after the unprecedented series of horrors perpetrated by Obama, George W. Bush Bashes Obama on Middle East. From the article:

Bush said that Obama’s plan to lift sanctions on Iran with a promise that they could snap back in place at any time was not plausible. He also said the deal would be bad for American national security in the long term: “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the deal.”

Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama’s policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. On Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011, he quoted Senator Lindsey Graham calling it a “strategic blunder.” Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaeda’s “second act” and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration’s handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch: “Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo, and now they’re doing it on TV.”