Donald Trump promised to shake up U.S. foreign policy. He has certainly done that from the Middle East to Asia. The U.S. is currently engaged in a three-front, maximum-pressure standoff with China, Iran, and North Korea — involving everything from tariffs to possible military action and the strictest sanctions in memory.
If you are in the Deep State, nothing could be worse. Until then, it was Eastasia v Oceania v Eurasia but with the fall of the Soviet Empire, great uncertainty remained. And for some reason, the rising star was China, beloved of the Deep State. Back to VDH.
At first, Trump critics saw these policy recalibrations as either impotent or counterproductive. Pessimists asserted that China, with a population four times the size of the United States’, was fated for world hegemony. Why antagonize those who might soon control our political and economic future?
Bipartisan experts talked not of the heresy of “stopping” China’s ascendance, but of “managing” America’s relative decline. Translated, the implicit policy conceded that the U.S., in its trade concessions, should overlook systematic Chinese trade surpluses, flagrant violations of world commercial norms, neocolonial provocations throughout Asia, stealing U.S. patents and copyrights, product dumping, currency manipulation, and technological appropriation. Supposedly, the more we appeased China through acts of magnanimity, the more they would reciprocate by becoming like us.
The fact is, a centralised economy cannot perform at the highest level. China is no longer full-on communist, but it is more than full-on totalitarian. In the West, there is at least a smidgen of a trace of a memory that economies work best, and innovate more, and raise living standards more certainly and reliably, if the economy is left to the market. So how’s this working out?
The canard was that there was no alternative to appeasement, given China’s more dynamic economy and cold-hearted efficiency — so beloved by progressives when it came to Beijing’s construction by fiat of high-speed rail, shiny airports, and solar and wind farms. Trump, we were told, was a ridiculous Quixote tilting at Chinese windmills, with his 19th-century talk of counterproductive “tariffs” and ossified “trade wars.”
Not now. The U.S. economy is still humming. The stock market is at record highs. Unemployment stays at near-record peacetime lows. Oil and gas production is beyond anyone’s wildest imagination just a few years ago. The Chinese economy, from what we can tell from its state-controlled media and censored state agencies, is slowing down. Human-rights activists are coming out of the shadows to damn China’s reeducation camps. Riots continue in Hong Kong, along with Orwellian surveillance of China’s own citizens at home.
So here we are, Deep State in dismay.
We are entering dangerous territory not because we are losing our trade war with China, but because we are beginning to win it. Xi Jinping not Trump has overplayed his hand. The Chinese know that they cannot end the standoff by returning to the former asymmetrical status quo. Nor can they embrace a new fair relationship — it would be antithetical to the very means by which China obtained its enormous wealth in the first place. Something then has to give.
Continues with a look at Iran and North Korea, both of which are similarly under extreme pressure to conform to Western norms. The conclusion:
In the next few months, we should expect a major provocation from either an increasingly beleaguered Iran or a flummoxed North Korea — and some sort of desperate quid pro quo from China presented as a last chance, a rare and magnanimous offer to stop the tariffs so “we can all just get along.”
Trump should stay the course and not let up until he achieves the original aim of his maximum pressure campaign. Nothing is more dangerous than to enter an existential standoff, feel momentum accruing, and then appease and grant concessions that destroy all prior sacrifice that heretofore had been finally paying off. Instead, he should expect our strapped adversaries at some point to do their worst, and then meet that challenge with our best — and ensure that our adversaries in their decline lack the power to take us down with them.
We shall see. Totalitarian states are hard to remove, and the love of power among those who have it is very strong indeed.
Wang claimed to have interfered with elections in Taiwan, infiltrated the student movement in Hong Kong and played a role in the kidnapping of the Causeway Bay Five, a group of Hong Kong booksellers snatched from Hong Kong and rendered to the Chinese mainland.
But five days on and multiple security sources have told The Weekend Australian the consensus view inside the security establishment is that while Wang’s claims are still being investigated, he is not the high-level operative-turned-defector he claimed to be. The Chinese Foreign Ministry was quick to denounce Wang, at the same time offering breezy assurances that China would never dream of meddling in the affairs of another state.
So think of this:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings said Wang’s confession had given Australian agencies an unprecedented insight into Beijing’s espionage activities. “We have, for the first time, direct and clear understandings from a Chinese intelligence operator himself about what China is doing in this country,” he said.
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who was involved in brokering Wang’s contact with ASIO and who appeared on the 60 Minutes broadcast, called him “a friend of democracy’’. “Anyone who’s willing to assist us in defending our sovereignty deserves our protection,” Hastie said.
The one possibility that can almost certainly be discounted is that Wang was sent by the Chinese themselves as a form of misdirection. That he was a bit player is no reason not to take him seriously. The question is whether he is a fantasist with no genuine knowledge or insight into anything of the Chinese spy apparatus. One way or another you will not know within a week. Let me finish with this from the case against:
“It is highly unusual for one junior intelligence operative (our assumption given his current 27 years of age) to play a big role in all these high-profile operations in different jurisdictions in a short period of time,’’ wrote Adam Ni, a researcher from Macquarie University and co-editor of China Neican, a newsletter aimed at “decoding” Chinese politics.
AND NOW THIS ALSO AT THE OZ:Security agencies wary of Andrew Hastie’s asylum call for ‘spy’. Let me just say that no one is going to do anything about our China policy no matter what is discovered based on this chap, one way or the other. But there is nothing wrong either with the story being given a public airing either. This is from the latest effort to downplay this issue.
Concerns have been raised at senior levels of Australia’s intelligence and security community about Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s call for an alleged former Chinese spy to be granted asylum ahead of the formal assessing of his case.
Mr Hastie, who carries authority as chairman of the federal parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, was quick to urge the Morrison government to give Wang Liqiang its “protection” as the first Chinese operative to blow his cover.
The West Australian Liberal, a former Special Air Service Regiment captain, is supported by China watchers who back his persistent criticism of Beijing for meddling in the sovereign affairs of other nations, and for its human rights record.
Top intelligence sources say an ASIO assessment could conclude Mr Wang is a former Beijing agent, as he claims, with intimate knowledge of covert Chinese operations in Australia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. But they also told The Weekend Australian, while not discounting Mr Hastie’s views, that the 27-year-old’s behaviour was highly unusual.
It might just be worth mentioning that nothing of any significance has ever been revealed that showed Joe McCarthy was anything other than 99% correct in everything he had said. We have enemies and they really do want to do us harm.
Mr Zhao called for developed countries to honour financial commitments including providing US$100 billion to poorer states harmed by climate change.
The US$100 billion – which China has said it is entitled to part of – was a non-binding accompaniment to the Paris Agreement, and was the annual amount that rich countries pledged to muster by 2020.
They wouldn’t say it unless they thought there were people who would take it seriously. And there are!
According to Ephraim Mirvis, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “the overwhelming majority of British Jews” are “gripped by anxiety” at the possibility of a Labour victory….
As Mirvis put it: “A new poison — sanctioned from the top — has taken root in (Britain’s) Labour Party.” Declaring Labour’s claim it is doing everything it can to stamp out the anti-Semitism a “mendacious fiction”, Mirvis concluded that in next month’s election, “the very soul of our nation is at stake”.
That Corbyn’s response would only have deepened the Chief Rabbi’s concerns should be obvious. Interviewed on Wednesday by the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Corbyn was asked four times whether he would like to apologise for the widely reported flaws in the party’s handling of anti-Semitism.
Each time, he refused. Meanwhile, his closest allies hurled a torrent of abuse at Mirvis, accusing him of everything from bigotry to homophobia.
That the Chief Rabbi should be compelled to make such an unprecedented statement at this time ought to alert us to the deep sense of insecurity and fear felt by many British Jews: pic.twitter.com/DNxr0Qxht5
Unfortunately, Britain’s Labour Party is not alone. As Peter Kurti demonstrates in a paper released earlier this month by the Centre for Independent Studies, anti-Semitic attitudes, which were once the exception, are rapidly becoming the norm in the “progressive” left worldwide.
To some extent that reflects the realities of political competition. According to a Pew Research Centre survey, more than 90 per cent of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries have an unfavourable view of Jews, with large numbers believing they are to blame for worsening relations between Muslims and the West.
As migrants from those countries constitute a rapidly growing share of left-leaning electorates in the advanced democracies, their prejudices have contaminated the outlook of politicians scrambling for Muslim votes.
But the Muslim share of Western electorates is scarcely large enough to account for much of the rise in anti-Semitism on the left.
If there's anyone who has any doubts about Jeremy Corbyn's anti-Semitism, this interview will clear things up. His equivocation, lack of accountability and reluctance even to acknowledge anti-Jewish bias is stunning: https://t.co/kQgbgCiNBV
Nor can it be explained by envy, hardship or insecurity, all of which underpinned the working-class anti-Semitism of the 1930s.
On the contrary, studies suggest the new anti-Semites are young, well-educated and reasonably well-off.
They are, of course, a heterogeneous group. However, what they have in common is the demonisation of Israel….
But alongside that anti-Semitism of the Third Worldists, there is, particularly in Europe, also a growing anti-Semitism of the comfortable elites. As French sociologist Danny Trom has found, what they loath is not Israel’s modernity but its commitment to values they would rather bury….
In an age of appeasement [Israel] rejects fashionable pieties, instead returning blow with blow. At a time when the “nowhere” are triumphant and the nation is denigrated as a straitjacket, it harbours a fierce patriotism. And in a world of disposable selfhood, where you are whoever you want to be, it remains stubbornly attached to an identity gained by birth and forged by faith.
It is, for all those reasons, the perfect object for the hatred of Third Worldists and cosmopolitans alike. Add to that mix the bacilli, which were never quite extinguished, of the old anti-Semitic tropes — conspiracy theory, national betrayal, secret global power — and the result is a brew as potent as it is toxic.
None of that implies a Corbyn government would unleash a new holocaust, though one should never forget Hannah Arendt’s grim admonition that “it is in the very nature of things human that once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been”.
Mayor Tory took to Twitter to say: “I am very disturbed by the apparent polarization and violence evident from the events of last night at York University. I have heard concerns from several Jewish groups in our city today. Anti-Semitism and violence is totally unacceptable.”
Both John Tory and Justin Trudeau’s condemnation of anti-Semitism sounded suspect to me, in that it was an example of politically correct parroting using language that carries no weight.
Trudeau was being something of a chameleon with his actions.
Yes, the PM denounced anti-Semitism at York. But he also joined hands with such luminaries of democracy and human rights as North Korea, Egypt, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe and the “State of Palestine” to betray its ally Israel and for the first time ever vote in favour of a United Nations resolution that condemns the country.
Politicians cannot claim to fight anti-Semitism while tolerating other examples of Jew hatred.
These votes are an annual ritual at the UN, where the Jewish state is targeted by the Islamic Bloc of over 50 countries, along with the Third World dictators they get to back them.
As for Mayor John Tory, he denounced anti-Semitism on one hand, but has no problem with opening up Toronto City Hall to Islamic call for prayers, the kind of which have previously referenced Jews as people who have earned the wrath of God — something I have documented in previous columns.
Even Toronto Police chaplain Musleh Khan is on record discussing supposed quotes from the prophet that Jews have earned the wrath of Allah.
You know, the media who, of course, you can trust to keep up with everything, wanted to know why he had gone for a medical examination and why he had not worn his tie. Here’s the answer.
And for what it’s worth, I typed in “trump in afghanista” and no links came up on google. Not even this one: TRUMP IN AFGHANISTAN, which comes with this.
Okay, yellow is Scottish Nationalist, green is Liberal, and grey is Democratic Unionist. I think. I’m no expert on British politics.
The irony of London – perhaps the capital city of capitalism – voting overwhelmingly for a Marxist who admires Venezuela.
They really would sell the rope that would be used to hang them.
SO LET ME ADD THIS AS WELL: From Brexit Ho! by John O’Sullivan.
After two weeks of Britain’s election campaign, which now has less than three weeks to run, the lack of excitement over its result is palpable. The national polls have been more or less steady since the starting gun was fired, with the Tories hovering around 40 percent support, Labour rising slightly to 30 percent, the Liberal Democrats stuck around 16 percent, and the Brexit party falling to single figures. The weekend saw a slight strengthening of all these trends, with the Tory percentage settling down in the mid-40s, for a lead over Labour of well into double figures. If repeated on Election Day, that would produce a solid Tory majority of about between 40 and 60 seats. As the pundits say, however, these figures could all change very rapidly under the influence of events.
Australia finds itself in new territory, grappling with a relationship based on shared economic interests but, as China brandishes its meddling authoritarian ways, at ideological odds. The latest revelations are a major wake-up call for Australia to ensure it protects itself, and its way of life.
These are the lead stories on The Age Online website. Preservation of our way of life you would hope is more important than foreign trade.
Bo ‘Nick’ Zhao was in trouble financially when he said he was approached with a million-dollar offer to become China’s man in Federal Parliament. ASIO released an extraordinary statement late on Sunday about the latest revelations.
The Morrison government has assured Australians the nation’s domestic spy agency is investigating claims from a potential Chinese defector that China tried to get a spy elected to Federal Parliament.
The election was seen as a test of community support for protests that continue after five months, with establishment figures campaigning on the need to restore stability.
That is a sentence about as wrong as could be written following the first week of the impeachment “investigation”. You’d kinda wish that at least The Oz might send someone along to the impeachment clown show who can understand, at least a little, that there is no there there. Instead they send Cameron Stewart who takes responsibility for this: Theatrics can’t disguise a simple reality: Republicans not turning. It’s not Republicans who are not being convinced, no one else is either other than the vast number of morons who want PDT out for reasons that are not identified. This is from the article:
Now that the public hearings are over, at least for now, in the impeachment inquiry we are able to draw three conclusions from the evidence so far.
The first is that Donald Trump appears to have done almost everything he is accused of in seeking to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The second is that the Democrats are hurtling towards impeachment and believe they already have enough material to argue Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanours”.
The third is that the evidence so far has failed to move a single Republican, with most believing that even if Trump did what he is accused of, it’s not an impeachable offence.
It has been a dream week for the Democrats, who saw almost everything go right except for the most important part — persuading congressional Republicans to abandon Trump.
This means, of course, that they are likely to impeach Trump in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and Republicans are likely to acquit him in a trial in the GOP-controlled Senate. In other words, Trump emerges with the black eye of being only the third president to be impeached, but keeps his job, with every chance of being re-elected.
He might also have mentioned that there has not been an ounce of evidence that the President has undertaken an impeachable offence. One might even go farther and ask why the President should not be asking the Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden. Remember this?
And all this on top of the illegal never mind immoral efforts by Obama and the Deep State to remove the elected president by any means necessary. The media are themselves the enemies of the people.
Law of Markets 