The diplomatic tempest between the United States and China that surrounded Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest — including the ineptitude displayed by the Obama administration in facilitating his release from China — has been well documented.

However, lost in the diplomatic uproar has been little detailed discussion of the actual issue that caused Guangcheng’s imprisonment in the first place: namely, his opposition to the Chinese government subjugating women to undergo forced abortions and sterilization in adherence to the country’s “one-child policy.”

Adopted in 1978 to curb China’s huge population growth, the one-child policy limits Chinese families to one child per couple. While the policy was initially proclaimed by the Chinese government to last only a generation, it has morphed into a permanent campaign of institutionalized violence against women and girls.

In addition to forced abortions and sterilization, that violence includes violators of the one-child policy — including whole families– sentenced to prison, forced labor camps, beatings, home arrest, severe fines, and loss of jobs.

Those abuses have been highlighted extensively by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a commission created by Congress to monitor human rights in China.

In its recent annual report, the congressional commission noted Chinese “official campaigns, as well as numerous individual cases in which officials used violent methods to coerce citizens to undergo sterilizations or abortions or pay heavy fines for having ‘out-of-plan’ children.”

For its part, the Chinese government has steadfastly denied that it is forcing women to submit to abortions and sterilization given that both activities are illegal under Chinese Law. However, detractors say those laws are often ignored by government officials whose promotions are tied with keeping birthrates low in adherence to the one child policy

Guangcheng shed light on that point in 2005 when he organized a class-action lawsuit against Chinese family planning officials in Shandong Provincefor forcing at least 7,000 women to undergo sterilization or late-term abortions in an effort to meet birth rate quotas mandated by the one-child policy.

For his efforts, Guangcheng was sentenced in 2006 to 51 months in prison before being released in 2010 and held under house arrest at his family’s farmhouse in Shandong Province, from where he recently escaped to find sanctuary at the American embassy in Beijing.

Yet, while the Chinese government may be upset over Guangcheng’s efforts to shine light on the seamier side of the one-child policy, it is quite happy to discuss the overall effects of the policy, which it considers to be a rousing success.

Specifically, despite today having the largest population on earth with more than 1.34 billion people, according to China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, the one-child policy has been able to prevent more than 400 million births in China.

The deal would have seen Chen released to a local hospital for treatment of his leg, injured in his daring escape from house arrest. The Chinese would have then allowed him to reunite with his family and move to a university town where he could continue his legal studies. The Chinese also promised that he would face no more legal issues and that the oppressive authorities in his hometown would be punished for their extra-legal detention of the activist.

From his hospital bed, Chen reached out to several news services, saying he had changed his mind and now wanted to leave China, a request he did not make while sheltered by the embassy because he was unaware that he and his family were in danger. He also claimed that an American official had told him that he had been advised by a Chinese government official that if he didn’t leave the embassy, they would beat his wife to death. The State Department strongly denies that charge, saying no American official told Mr. Chen anything except that if he didn’t leave the embassy, his wife would be sent home from Beijing.

The confusion surrounding the deal has the potential to upend the economic and security talks between the two countries that begin on Thursday. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are in Beijing for bi-lateral talks that will touch on security issues like Iran and North Korea as well as economic matters like China’s currency policies and its huge trade surplus with the US.

Shortly after Chen’s release, the Chinese foreign ministry issued a blistering statement, demanding that the US apologize for sheltering Chen and for interfering in the internal affairs of China. And American officials who were staying with Chen at the hospital were ordered to leave, replaced by a cordon of plainclothes policemen who limited access to the activist. It is unclear whether the Chinese will follow through and live up to their end of the bargain, which has caused Chen to change his mind about staying in China and is now pleading with US officials to secure his passage to America for himself and his family.

Chen, who fought government officials in his rural province for years over their forced abortion policy and other outrages, told the Associated Press that he fears for his family’s safety. His lawyer, Teng Biao, told the Washington Post, “He felt his safety is threatened. He feels pressure now,” Teng said. “In fact, from his language, I can tell that the decision to leave the embassy was not 100 percent his idea,” he added.

In an emailed statement to the New York Times, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland denied the claim that Chen was coerced into leaving the embassy:

At no time did any U.S. official speak to Chen about physical or legal threats to his wife and children, nor did Chinese officials make any such threats to us. U.S. interlocutors did make clear that if Chen elected to stay in the embassy, Chinese officials had indicated to us that his family would be returned to Shandong, and they would lose their opportunity to negotiate for reunification.

Chen told Reuters that the reason he changed his mind about staying in China was because, once in the hospital, he was able to speak to his wife, who told him of his family being menaced by authorities. “When I was inside the American embassy, I didn’t have my family, and so I didn’t understand some things. After I was able to meet them, my ideas changed.” He also made a personal appeal in a CNN interview to President Obama to help him escape China with his family because he feared for his life after learning that his wife had been bound and beaten following his escape:

She was tied to a chair by police for two days. Then they carried thick sticks to our house, threatening to beat her to death. Now they have moved into the house. They eat at our table and use our stuff. Our house is teeming with security — on the roof and in the yard. They installed seven surveillance cameras inside the house and built electric fences around the yard.

The fact that the Chen incident threatened to overshadow the bi-lateral talks with China and that the US was desperate to make a deal in order to remove Chen as an irritant prior to the meetings gives credence to the dissident’s charges of coercion — despite the denials by US officials. But it is clear that Chen changed the parameters of the deal himself when he performed an about-face and indicated he wanted US help to leave the country. This was not part of the original bargain and his request has American diplomats scrambling to explain their actions, as well as control the political damage that has exploded back in America.

Last week, Chen slipped away from his heavily guarded farmhouse in rural Shandong province, where he has been a prisoner for nearly two years. He made his break at night, taking advantage of the darkness with which he lives permanently. Although his current whereabouts are unknown, he is reportedly under the protection of U.S. diplomats in the capital of Beijing, some 350 miles away.

That a blind man was able to dodge his heavily guarded confinement was discomfiting enough for the government. But the timing of Chen’s escape is also a major black eye for China. It comes just days ahead of a major economic summit in China this week. Where attention was supposed to focus on China’s economic growth, Chen’s escape has trained it instead on its continued suppression of human rights.

It is only the latest embarrassment Chen has inflicted on the government. What made him the target of domestic persecution and international acclaim was his work exposing the Chinese government’s brutal population control methods under its notorious “One-Child” policy. Chinese leaders have denied that such a policy even exists, but Chen, a dogged and meticulous lawyer, collected overwhelming evidence showing not only that the policy exists but the government has employed horrific measures like forced late-term abortions and compulsory sterilization to enforce it. It was a shocking confirmation that, for all its vaunted economic success in recent years, China remains a deeply repressive and backward country.

Government retaliation was quick to follow. In 2006, Chen was “disappeared” for three months in an undisclosed detention center, only to be released just in time to face a trial on charges of “damaging property and organizing a mob to disrupt traffic” – this despite the fact that he had been detained when the crimes supposedly took place. After just two hours of jury deliberation, Chen was handed a four-year prison sentence. When he later attempted to challenge the verdict at a subsequent retrial, key witnesses for his defense disappeared, one at a time, yet the court upheld the verdict anyway.
 After being released from prison in September 2010, Chen and his family were sentenced without charge to house arrest.

Today, Chen is effectively a prisoner in his own home. Guarded by a battery of police and security thugs, he and his family are subjected to regular beatings and forbidden to leave their home, even to seek medical treatment. No visitors are permitted to meet with him, as “Batman” star Christian Bale discovered when he was forcibly turned away from Chen’s home.

It speaks to Chen’s indomitable will that none of this has stopped him. Despite the devastating conditions of his house arrest, he has remained an outspoken critic of the communist government and its human rights abuses. Already, he has used his brief time in freedom to reveal the full brutality with which he lives daily, releasing a video address to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

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The Obama administration is indifferent to the spreading use of abortion to deliberately control the growth of the female population. This should not be surprising, considering that, as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama consistently refused to support legislation that would define an infant who survives a late-term induced-labor abortion as a human being with the right to live.

And, as I will discuss below, left-wing feminists are perfectly willing to ignore the war against future generations of baby girls if it means preserving abortion on demand at all costs.

Without the deliberate tilting of the scales against the birth of baby girls through gender-discriminatory abortions, the normal sex ratio at birth (SRB) for large human populations has tended to be in the range of 105 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls. There are millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year, whom Eberstadt defines as the number of baby girls who would have been expected to be born based on the normal biological sex ratio at birth, but were not given a chance to live because of sex-selective feticide.

Eberstadt documents the tragic statistics in his article, starting with China, where girls are not valued as highly as boys. Anti-female eugenics by abortion has resulted in a sex ratio at birth approaching 120 in China – more than 14% over the expected natural biological norm. Eberstadt provides detailed SRB figures by Chinese province, with the ratio reaching more than 130 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls in at least two provinces.

China has a coercive population control program known as the “One Child Only” policy. Although Beijing officially outlawed prenatal sex determination in 1989, and criminalized sex-selective abortion in 2004, it does little to enforce those laws while concentrating its resources on enforcing its overall One Child Only program. That’s not to say that such enforcement is airtight. Some families do have more than one child. According to Eberstadt, the total number of births per woman per lifetime is estimated by the UN Population Division as averaging 1.64 for the 2005-2010 period, and by the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base at 1.54 for the year 2010. However, the data show that Chinese families are more inclined to strictly adhere to the One Child Only edict by means of abortion if they learn that the second child would have been a girl.

“Chinese parents appear to have been generally willing to rely upon biological chance for the sex outcome of their first baby,” Eberstadt observed, “but with increasing frequency they have been relying upon health care technology and services to ensure that any second- or higher-order baby would be a boy.”

At work is the interplay of coercive governmental action and cultural norms. The Chinese government seeks to strictly control the overall population through the means of its enforced, but imperfect, One Child Only policy. Cultural norms in China that devalue the worth of girls, as compared to boys, have led many Chinese women to submit to abortions of prenatally identified female fetuses, particularly if they already have a child. The sex ratio at birth for children born after the first child has been “stratospheric,” according to Eberstadt. As of 2005, this ratio was an astonishing 143 for second births and rose to 156 for third births – 36% and 48% above the natural biological sex ratio respectively.

Eberstadt concluded that, to the extent there are births in a Chinese family beyond one child, they are heavily skewed on purpose towards male births:

“…there is absolutely no doubt that shockingly distorted sex ratios for newborns and children prevail in China today — and that these gender imbalances have increased dramatically during the decades of the One Child Policy…In effect, most of contemporary China’s abortions are thus intentional female feticides.”

The net result is that, through deliberate killing of fetuses identified as female by inexpensive prenatal gender determination ultrasonography, the population in China is being socially engineered to radically favor boys over girls.

Let’s not forget that Vice President Joe Biden said during his official visit to China: “I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” The “pro-women” Obama administration is also not second-guessing China’s use of abortions to deliberately extinguish the lives of little girls in the womb. Tragically, the Obama administration is making American taxpayers accessories to this calamity. It insists on contributing to the United Nations Population Fund, which helps China carry out its brutal population control policies.

China, while the most coercive in its eugenics policies, is far from the only country experiencing alarming unnatural disparities in the sex ratio at birth between boys and girls due to widespread abortions of female fetuses that have been gender identified by inexpensive obstetric ultrasonography. Eberstadt lists other countries in Asia with similarly high ratio disparities such as Singapore, Vietnam, and India where sex-selective abortion is technically illegal.

The sex-selective abortions cut across religious, educational, socio-economic lines.

However, Eberstadt identifies three forces contributing to this anti-female outcome in the Asian countries that he focused on. They are (1) “local mores that uphold a truly merciless preference for sons;” (2) “low or sub-replacement fertility trends which freight the gender outcome of each birth with extra significance for parents with extreme gender bias,” and (3) “easy and affordable abortion and prenatal sex diagnostics” that enable the eugenic manipulation of the population to favor males over females.

With globalization and increased mobility, intentional female feticides are becoming a world-wide phenomenon. Eberstadt estimates that over fifty countries and territories accounting for over 3.2 billion people, or nearly half of the world’s total population, have unnaturally high sex ratios at birth. The unnatural “girl deficit” for females 0-19 years of age as of 2010 are estimated to have totaled in the range of 32-33 million.

In 1790, 90 percent of Americans did agricultural work. Agriculture is now in “shambles” because only 2 percent of Americans have farm jobs. In 1970, the telecommunications industry employed 421,000 well-paid switchboard operators. Today “disaster” has hit the telecommunications industry, because there are fewer than 20,000 operators. That’s a 95 percent job loss. The spectacular advances that have raised productivity in the telecommunications industry have made it possible for fewer operators to handle tens of billions of calls at a tiny fraction of the 1970 cost.

For the most part, rising worker productivity and advances in technology are the primary causes of reduced employment and higher output in the manufacturing, agriculture and telecommunications industries. My question is whether Congress should outlaw these productivity gains in the name of job creation. It would be easy. Just get rid of those John Deere harvesting machines that do in a day what used to take a thousand men a week, outlaw the robots and automation that eliminated many manufacturing jobs and bring back manually operated PBX telephone switchboards. By the way, if technological advances had not eliminated millions of jobs, where in the world would we have gotten the workers to produce all those goods and services that we now enjoy that weren’t even thought of decades ago? The bottom line is that the health of an industry is measured by its output, not by the number of people it employs.

When Americans buy more goods from Canadians, Chinese and Mexicans than they buy from us, it’s a problem.

The president’s just-released budget proposal for 2013 includes steep cuts in federal military spending. Requested military appropriations are about $32 billion less than this year’s total. Meanwhile, Defense officials recently unveiled a plan to cut department spending by $260 billion over the next five years.

There’s certainly a need for federal fiscal reform. But amidst this belt-tightening, genuinely vital military programs shouldn’t get axed. There are important new weapons and intelligence systems in development that hold the promise of radically improving our fighting capabilities and making the world a safer place.

Chief among them is the Air Force Space Fence Program. This program needs to stay funded and on schedule.

The Space Fence uses a system of radars to detect and track space debris in primarily low Earth orbit (LEO) — around 700 to 3,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface where the majority of space debris is located. Space Fence also provides capability beyond LEO to support cataloging of satellites and debris with other space-based sensors. This information is used by military and commercial satellites to adjust their orbits in the event they’re headed for a potential collision.

Space debris might sound like a worry better suited for science fiction — but it’s not.

Official estimates put the number of objects in Earth’s orbit in the millions, with at least 500,000 pieces over half-an-inch long. Our orbit is now cluttered with defunct satellites, spent rocket boosters, and nuts and bolts from old spacecraft. And as the number of countries with space programs has increased, so has the amount of debris.

Indeed, back in 2009 a satellite owned by communications firm Iridium collided with a Russian satellite, splintered both, and generated thousands of pieces of new space junk.

This debris is whipping around the Earth at up to 17,500 miles per hour. At that speed, even a small object can do serious damage to satellites or space stations. And NASA predicts that space vehicles now face a roughly 1-in-250 chance of a catastrophic collision with debris. That might not sound like much, but extended over 100 missions the risk of disaster hits a disturbingly high 33 percent.

America’s policy of nuclear deterrence is being seriously threatened as President Obama considers proposals by the Defense Department that could cut the US nuclear arsenal by as much as 80 percent, reducing America’s deployed nuclear strategic warheads to as few as 300.

While the New START nuclear treaty with Russia commits the United States to reducing its arsenal of deployed strategic long-range nuclear weapons from 5,113 to 1,550 by 2018, it does not prohibit either country from cutting below those mandated levels.

Thus, the White House — as part of the Obama administration’s evaluation of America’s nuclear force requirements — is exploring ways to go even further below that nuclear threshold. The White House has directed the Defense Department to examine three levels of deployed strategic nuclear warheads: 1,000 to 1,100 warheads; 700 to 800 warheads; and 300 to 400 warheads.

Cutting America’s nuclear arsenal to 300 warheads — a level not seen since 1950 — would place the number of US strategic nuclear weapons at a level comparable with France, heightening fears that it would make America’s strategy of nuclear deterrence obsolete.

Yet, even if President Obama ultimately accepts the 1,100 level of strategic nuclear warheads, it would still represent a significant and serious nuclear cutback given that many American military officials claim that the 1,550 level mandated by New START is the lowest level that can be used to maintain deterrence of a nuclear attack.

Moreover, they argue, such a cutback in nuclear weapons would also serve to undermine the credibility of the nuclear “umbrella” that the United States extends to its allies (such as South Korea and Japan). Absent US nuclear protection, those countries may very well feel compelled to build their own nuclear forces. In fact, Saudi Arabia is already planning to initiate its own nuclear program if Iran gets a nuclear bomb.

Unfortunately, the decision to neuter America’s nuclear forces comes at the same time the Obama administration is working to heavily diminish America’s conventional forces, a process begun in January when Obama ordered a shift from the nation’s longstanding capability to fight two major conflicts at once.

That policy shift notwithstanding, the administration’s plan to cut its nuclear forces engendered harsh rebukes, with former UN ambassador John Bolton saying it was by itself “sufficient to vote against Obama in November,” while Republican Senator Jim Inhofe accused Obama of “catering to his liberal base that believes that, if we unilaterally disarm, the rest of the world will follow suit.”

For its part, the Obama administration maintains it is not pursuing unilateral cuts, but it is saying that the different nuclear level proposals being floated represent nuclear arsenal levels that could be negotiated with Russia in a future round of arms-control talks.

However, it doesn’t seem as if the Russians are in any hurry to further pare down their nuclear arsenal more than what has been mandated by New START. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acknowledged as much when he recently said that Russia should keep its nuclear deterrence potential to ensure its strategic stability, saying, “We should not lead anyone to temptation by our weakness. That is why under no circumstances will we give up the strategic deterrence potential and we will strengthen it.”

To prove Putin’s point, in 2011 alone the Russian government announced plans that it was buying 36 strategic ballistic missiles, two strategic missile submarines, and 20 strategic cruise missiles. Additionally, during that time it reportedly modified its ICBMs and SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles) and increased its number of MIRVS (Multiple, Independently Targeted Warheads).

Also, in December 2011 Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) announced that it would begin renovating its Topol-M and Yars RS-24 missile systems and start construction on a new 100-ton ballistic missile to replace the RS-36 Voyevoda ICBM, known as the Satan missile.

Of course, Russia isn’t the only nuclear state seeking to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. A recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) reported that both Pakistan and India “continue to develop new ballistic and cruise missile systems capable of delivering nuclear weapons” as well as “expanding their capacities to produce fissile material for military purposes.”

To that end, Pakistan has reportedly increased its nuclear arsenal from an estimated 90 nuclear warheads in 2009 to 110 nuclear warheads, with reports it can reach 150-200 nuclear warheads within a decade. In July 2011, India received from Russia its the Akula-II class “Nerpa” nuclear attack submarine, equipped with 28 nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a striking range of 3,000 kilometers.

Nearly 6000 Syrians have died during the 10-month revolt against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including hundreds of children. In one of the worst single day outbursts of violence, which occurred on February 3rd, the death toll from shelling by Syrian security forces in the city of Homs alone exceeded 200.

In the midst of the escalating violence, the United Nations Security Council met in a special Saturday session on February 4th to address the crisis in Syria. It failed to take any action after Russia and China vetoed a resolution expressing moral support for the beleaguered Syrian people and endorsing a plan put forward by the Arab League to help them move peacefully beyond Assad towards democracy. The Security Council let the Syrian people down as Assad’s killing machine continues to massacre innocent civilians.

Last week started out with much fanfare. The Arab League’s secretary general and the prime minister of Qatar addressed the Security Council in person on January 31st to present the Arab League’s plan and ask for the Security Council’s endorsement.

“The government killing machine continues effectively unabated,” said Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. “The hope of the Syrian people is in your hands,” he added.

“Do not let the Syrian people down in its plight,” said the Arab League Secretary General Nabil el-Araby.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several of her counterparts, including the foreign ministers of France and the United Kingdom, followed the presentation of the Arab League plan to the Security Council with their own supportive speeches.

In her stern address to the Council, Clinton harshly condemned the Syrian regime’s brutality against its citizens and urged full backing for the Arab League’s plan. “It is time for the international community to put aside our own differences and send a clear message of support to the people of Syria,” Clinton told the Council. “The alternative – spurning the Arab League, abandoning the Syrian people, emboldening the dictator – would compound this tragedy, and would mark a failure of our shared responsibility, and shake the credibility of the United Nations Security Council.”

Russia and China had vetoed a prior resolution last October concerning the violence in Syria.  Russia in particular has been running interference for its ally Assad, whose regime is a major customer for Russian weapons and has provided Russia with access to one of its ports.

Mindful of the fate of the prior resolution, which had been spearheaded by the West, Clinton reminded the Council that this time it was the Arab League taking the lead and asking the Council for its support:

So why is the Arab League here before this Security Council?  Because they are seeking the support of the international community for a negotiated, peaceful political solution to this crisis and a responsible, democratic transition in Syria.  And we all have a choice:  Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé accused the Syrian regime of “crimes against humanity.” He added that the Arab League was offering the only viable plan to counter the violence and help facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy. “We have to take it,” Ambassador Juppé said.

However, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin made it clear in his own remarks on January 31st that Russia would oppose any Security Council resolution that attempted “to prescribe outcomes” for the Syrian regime.

In the days that followed these speeches, Morocco’s original draft resolution went through successive mark-ups that were circulated in an effort to reach a consensus among all the members of the Security Council. While China is reported to have proposed little during the informal discussions, Russia insisted upon and obtained a number of key concessions. Bringing Russia on board was the key to passage of the resolution. China, in this case, was viewed as joined at the hip with Russia and likely to follow whatever Russia ultimately decided to do.

The Arab League plan proposed specific steps to successfully transition to democracy. Under the plan, Syrian President Assad would first cede power to his vice president, followed by the formation of a national unity government with the opposition and ultimately a new constitution and new elections. The original text of the Security Council resolution laid out these same steps. However, by the end of the week, these steps were removed from the final draft of the resolution as a concession to Russia.

The original proposed resolution expressed the Security Council’s “grave concern at the continued transfer of weapons into Syria which fuels the violence” and called on the member states “to take necessary steps to prevent such flow of arms.”

The final draft removed any reference to weapons as a further concession to Russia.

The final draft also made clear that nothing in the resolution authorizes the use of any military force to accomplish its purpose.

Russia even managed to promote itself in the resolution as a partner with the Arab League in the search for a peaceful solution. The final resolution draft  noted specifically “the offer of the Russian Federation to host a meeting in Moscow, in consultation with the League of Arab States.”

Everything appeared to be on track by the end of last week to finally bring Russia on board, until Russia decided at the last moment to introduce some amendments with a few revisions to the resolution’s wording. That is where the United States, France, the United Kingdom and others on the Council drew a line in the sand. They decided that Russia had gone too far in trying to weaken the resolution’s text. Precious time was being wasted while civilians were dying in Syria.

Last week Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper demonstrated that he’s more than willing to do that which his counterpart in the White House is unable or unwilling to do: display a little backbone when dealing with radical environmentalists and their pet causes. Harper’s administration both commenced hearings on an alternative pipeline that would be used to ship Canadian crude to China, as well as putting the “green movement” on notice that extremism masquerading as environmentalism will no longer be tolerated in the Great White North.

Clearly Canada would prefer to ship crude recovered from massive reserves in Alberta to Texas via the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, the combination of green fear-mongering and President Obama’s predictable dithering has put approval of Keystone XL in doubt. Per his deal with Congress the President has until February 21 to approve the pipeline project or to explain his refusal to do so. Yet, even if the President does approve the project and risk annoying those among his supporters who worship planet earth even more than they do him, there is no guarantee that construction of Keystone XL would start anytime soon.

As Harper is aware, the United States is as litigious a society as there is on earth and – thanks to the many misguided decisions made in the pursuit of environmental purity by both parties – the massive statutory and regulatory infrastructures that have been constructed in the name of protecting mother earth practically guarantee that environmental groups could tie up an approval of Keystone XL in the courts for years.  It would be silly to put all one’s eggs in one basket in any case, but given the dysfunctional manner with which America addresses environmental issues and energy issues, Harper would be worse than foolish to assume that Canada’s best energy customer will continue to be so.

So, the Harper government opened hearings on the Northern Gateway pipeline, an alternative route that would send crude from Alberta to Kimat, British Columbian, where it would be loaded onto tankers and shipped to energy-starved China. To be sure that the pipeline faces opposition and its own bureaucratic obstacles as well, but with hundreds of billions of revenue at risk it is clearly well worth the effort to move forward on both tracks. Keystone XL is surely the preferred – and sensible – way to get Alberta’s crude to market, but Northern Gateway will do just fine if the United States is too stupid to approve a project that is so clearly in our national interest.

For not only would Keystone XL generate tens of thousands of new jobs, both in terms of construction jobs and in terms of a myriad of employment opportunities down the supply chain, it would also take a huge bite out of overseas oil imports. At full capacity, Keystone XL would provide about ten percent of America’s crude oil demand, without the slightest risk of a foreign tyrant cutting off production or closing a supply route.

The Obama administration has been toying with a proposition so dangerous it dare not utter it directly.

The NY Times oped pages headline writers helped generate the proper spin for this pernicious ploy: “To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan.” The story by Paul V. Kane, a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war and former international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, spelled out with wide-eyed enthusiasm a fantasy that would have disastrous consequences for America if it were ever enacted.

Mr. Kane urged President Obama to make a Faustian bargain with China’s leaders.

“He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015,” Kane wrote.

In support of his “grand bargain,” Kane argued that “Today, the America has little strategic interest in Taiwan,” an argument the “China-is-not-a-threat” lobby has been making unsuccessfully for years.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in China this week, ostensibly to win China’s support for the latest round of Iran sanctions, an embargo on Iranian oil sales and a ban on Iran’s Central Bank.

Given the lack of public outcry over Mr. Kane’s trial balloon, will Geithner make the debt-for-Taiwan pitch while he is there?

The Chinese appear to be playing along. In a story filed from Beijing on Tuesday about Geithner’s upcoming visit, the Associated Press touted China’s hostility toward more Iran sanctions.

“China has no reason to go along with this,” the AP quoted an Iran analyst at Peking University as saying. “China does not want to be seen as helping the U.S. when China’s own interest is concerned.”

So in other words, if the U.S. wants to get China’s cooperation on the oil cut-off and Central Bank sanctions, we are going to have to offer something really, really important. How about Taiwan? These days an island of free enterprise just across the Strait from China is seen more as an affront than an asset by the Obama White House.

And let’s not forget that in signing the new Iran sanctions into law on December 31, President Obama said he disagreed with the sanctions and had no intention of applying them.

So the table is set for a betrayal of Taiwan.

This President needs no lessons in cynicism from anyone. He recently announced a permanent deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia to defend against a growing China threat, so he can argue that he is no softie when it comes to Chinese expansionism. But defend Taiwan? Why? After all, as Kane says in his NY Times gambit, “our relationship with Taiwan, as revised in 1979, is a vestige of the cold war,” and “fear of a Red China menacing Asia is anachronistic.”

The Republican National Committee is taking the debt-for-Taiwan gambit so seriously that they will vote on a resolution at their annual winter meeting in New Orleans on Friday that would enshrine U.S. military support for Taiwan as a guiding foreign policy doctrine for the party’s presidential candidate this year.

What happens to Taiwan is “potentially the biggest foreign policy challenge that a new president will face, so we want our candidates to know our position and help them formulate their own,” Indiana RNC member James Bopp told the Washington Times.

The draft RNC resolution includes support for continued arms sales to Taiwan, and an acknowledgement of Taiwan’s strategic relationship with the United States. Several of the resolution sponsors are seeking to get the presidential candidates to talk about Taiwan during the campaign. They have included a provision requiring the RNC to send the resolution to all the GOP presidential hopefuls, something the Washington Times says is “a first” for the GOP and has never been done by Democrats.

Some of us have been warning about Communist China’s intentions since the early 1990s and before. A series of investigative magazine articles I wrote for the America Spectator about the sell-off of U.S. military technology to China became part of the “China-gate” scandal of the Clinton years. (Those stories are now available in a low-price Kindle edition).

“North Korea as we know it is over,” according to Victor Cha, Asian affairs specialist to President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007. “Whether it comes apart in the next few weeks or over several months, the regime will not be able to hold together after the untimely death of its leader, Kim Jong-il.”

For the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that Cha is correct. If the Kim Dynasty’s days are indeed numbered, what will the end look like?

History offers some helpful, if not always uplifting, examples of how North Korea could collapse.

The ideal parallels—the economic liberalization of China and the bloodless reunification of East and West Germany—also seem the least likely.

The prospect of North Korea following China into quasi-capitalism seems remote, at least for now. This is a closed society, an economy smaller than virtually every state in the U.S., a country whose most lucrative exports are retrofitted Soviet-era missiles and counterfeit $100 bills, a place where citizens are required to donate food to the armed forces.

But as Ralph Cossa of the Center for Strategic and International Studies observes, “There appears to be some hope, primarily emanating from Beijing, that Kim Jong-un will take North Korea down the path of Chinese-style reform.”

One way, perhaps the only way, this could happen is if China decides to intervene directly in North Korea’s economic and political system. Given Beijing’s keen interest in preventing the sort of collapse in North Korea that would either a) invite intervention by South Korea and the U.S. on humanitarian or self-defense grounds or b) trigger a confrontation enfolding some of the most powerful militaries on earth, such interference by Beijing would not be unthinkable. Neither would it be unprecedented. In fact, it arguably would be akin to an economic version of China’s late-1950 invasion across the Yalu, which aimed to prevent a U.S. takeover of the North.

Cha notes that Beijing could, in effect, “adopt [North Korea] as a province” by offering massive aid and assistance packages conditioned on the younger Kim’s “promises of economic reform.” This could stave off the sort of dramatic, near-term change that so worries Beijing.

As to the German-reunification scenario, it pays to recall that North and South Koreans, quite unlike East and West Germans, fought each other in a brutal war, which means they bear scars and wounds that pre-unification Germans did not. Plus, for East Germans, there was no “Great Successor” to worship. By 1989, even the true believers understood that the communist state was dead. This is not the case in North Korea, where the people are completely isolated from the outside world—and totally controlled by a propaganda machine that deifies the regime. Witness the mass-mourning by the North Korean people—all for a brutal tyrant who starved them.

In other words, North Koreans don’t appear to have the will or the wherewithal—or quite simply the strength, given a diet that relies on grass as a staple—to tear down the Kim Dynasty. So, a “Pyongyang Spring” seems unlikely. And even if there is some germ of a freedom movement in North Korea—some North Korean Havel ready to speak truth to power—it’s difficult to imagine the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) remaining garrisoned like the armies of the Soviet bloc in 1989, 1990 and 1991, if the younger Kim ever calls for help. The NKPA is the most paranoid, propagandized and privileged part of North Korea. Why wouldn’t it try to sustain the regime? Why wouldn’t it turn against its own countrymen?

Given Hollywood’s history of kowtowing before left-wing dictators, from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez, it’s novel for a silver-screen celebrity to make news for confronting a repressive communist regime. But “Batman” star Christian Bale stirred up a worthy row recently when he clashed with Chinese security forces after attempting to meet with Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.

Backed by a CNN camera crew, Bale tried to make his way to Chen’s house in the village of Dongshigu. That proved unacceptable to the government security guards who keep Chen under house arrest. After blocking Bale’s path and assaulting his crew, the guards chased them from the village. Rapid economic growth has brought China positive press in recent years, but Bale’s experience is a reminder that, despite its new capitalist face, China remains a quintessentially communist county in its rigid intolerance of dissent.

Chen Guangcheng’s story is a prime example. His crime in the eyes of Chinese authorities is exposing the government’s often-brutal strategies for population control in the country’s rural areas under its notorious one-child policy. Chen collected evidence showing that the government has resorted to everything from forced late-term abortions to compulsory sterilization to enforce the policy, giving the lie to the frequent denials of Chinese leaders  that such a policy exists.

For bringing the state’s cruelties to light Chen, a self-taught lawyer who has been blind since infancy, has been the victim of an unrelenting government harassment campaign. In 2006, he was “disappeared” for three months, resurfacing from an unidentified detention center just in time to face a trial on trumped up charges of “damaging property and organizing a mob to disrupt traffic.” After just two hours, he was sentenced to four years in jail. When he challenged the verdict at a subsequent retrial, key witnesses for his defense disappeared, one by one. The court upheld the verdict anyway.
Officially, Chen is now under so-called “soft-detention.” But that’s an absurd description of someone who is unable to leave his house, even to visit a hospital for treatment, and who is beaten and abused by government security. And, as Bale discovered, no one is permitted to meet with him.

The irony is that Bale was in China to make a film that, according to early reviews, is effectively pro-China propaganda. “The Flowers of War,” in which Bale stars, tells the story of the 1937 massacre of the Chinese city of Nanjing (formerly Nanking) by Japanese troops. In the horrific six-week siege, Japanese soldiers systematically raped, tortured and killed Chinese civilians. The final death toll was estimated to be between 250,000 and 300,000. The atrocity has long soured Sino-Japanese relations, but since the 1980s the Chinese government has sought to use it for political advantage, as a way to promote nationalist and patriotic sentiment. Whatever its merits as a film, “The Flowers of War” seems intended to compliment that propaganda effort. Partially funded by the Chinese government, the film takes a one-dimensional view of the Japanese, portraying them as “monochrome monsters,” as the Wall Street Journal described it.

Republicans and Democrats, liberals as well as conservatives, have bought into anti-Chinese trade demagoguery. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that tariffs against China are a “key part of our ‘Make It in America’ agenda.” During his 2010 campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called his tea party-backed Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, “a foreign worker’s best friend.” In a recent news conference, President Barack Obama gave his support to the anti-China campaign, declaring that China “has been very aggressive in gaming the trading system to its advantage,” adding that “we can and should take action against countries that are keeping their currencies undervalued … (and) that, above all, means China.”

Republican 2012 presidential candidates have jumped on the anti-China bandwagon. Mitt Romney wrote: “If I am fortunate enough to be elected president, I will work to fundamentally alter our economic relationship with China. … I will begin on Day One by designating China as the currency manipulator it is.” Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was even more challenging, saying, “I want to go to war with China.”

Let’s look at the magnitude of our trade with China. An excellent place to start is a recent publication (8/8/2011) by Galina Hale and Bart Hobijn, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, titled “The U.S. Content of ‘Made in China.’” One of the several questions they ask is: What is the fraction of U.S. consumer spending for goods made in China? Their data sources are the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The panel discussion below recently took place at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida (Nov. 17-20, 2011). The transcript follows. To view the question and answer session, click here.

Part I

Part II

Michael Wienir: We have a lot of things to talk about.  And in particular, we want to have enough time so you can ask questions of the panelists and interact with them, and they can interact with each other.  So, I still see stragglers back there.  It’s like herding cats trying to do this job.  It is not an easy job, for those of you that think it’s an easy job.

Come on, stragglers, pull up a chair.  Sit down, the doors are closing.  You don’t want to be outside anyway, the weather is not particularly good.

My name is Dr. Michael Wienir.  And it is my pleasure as chairman of the Board of Directors of the David Horowitz Freedom Center to welcome you to the 2011 Restoration Weekend.  And let me take this moment to simply thank all of you for your support in the past, in the present and, I know, in the future.

As David Horowitz has said, we are an effective battle tank, we’re not just a think tank.  And we have a general on the panel.  And the key is that the ammunition that this battle tank uses is generated by David and other members of the Center.  But the fuel to make this tank go is provided by your generosity and the generosity of over 90,000 people who across the country are contributors large and small to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  We can’t wage this battle — we cannot fight, this tank will not run — without your support and without your help.

The mission of the David Horowitz Freedom Center is quite simply the defense of free society, whose moral and ethical and cultural foundations are under attack by enemies at home and abroad, both secular and religious.  And that’s what our mission is.  That’s what we do.  And we’re a unique organization.

David has defined the values of the Center, and there are a number of them — very similar to what Herman Cain had to say this morning — individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, capitalism, free markets, and equal opportunity.  Not radical egalitarianism; equal opportunity at the starting line, not equal outcome at the finish line.  Not redistribution of wealth, but creation of wealth for all our citizens.  We work to create these opportunities in the private sector, and we support strong defense to preserve and protect these values.  And we reject surrender, appeasement, retreat and defeat.

Dennis Prager, who is not here this weekend but is a friend of the Center, points out what America really is, the trilogy — liberty — not what the Left wants, which is equality, and not individual freedom — E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — not multiculturalism — and In God We Trust — not secularism.

This panel, then, is defined as the decline of the West — meaning these Western values — and the rise of the rest — secular socialism, Marxism, Islamofascism, and this Chinese model of — I didn’t know how to actually title it, but I guess it’s totalitarian mercantilism.

(Laughter)

So the questions for the panel that I’ve asked them all to address is — one, is the West really in decline?  Do you accept the premise of the title of the panel?  If the West is not in decline, I’ve asked them to defend their position and answer your questions.  Number two, if you agree that the West is in decline, what is the specific cause of that decline?  And if you agree that the West is in decline, what can be done to reverse the trend?  And finally, are you optimistic, or are you pessimistic?  Four simple questions.

Now, each panelist gets 10 minutes to do this.  It’s better than 30 seconds on that Presidential debate.  And then we should have about 20 or 25 minutes for the panelists to interact with each other and for you to ask your questions, which they will answer.

First panelist is Bruce Bawer, who I just had the pleasure of meeting — I’ve read his books.  Bruce is an American literary critic and writer and poet.  He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He’s taught courses in literature and composition, in search of a tolerant society.  He moved to Amsterdam from New York in 1998, and then to Oslo, Norway — I believe it’s 1999 — only to confront the intolerance of Islam and their tolerance — European tolerance of intolerance.

Among his many books and writings are “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” and, in 2009, “Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.”  Bruce is now a Shillman Fellow — and you’ll hear more about Bob Shillman’s generosity and the Shillman Fellowships later on during this weekend — and as such is a regular contributor to our website, which I hope you’re on every day, FrontPageMag.com.

Bruce?

(Applause)

Bruce Bawer: Thank you, Michael.  Thank you, everybody for being here.  Thank you to the David Horowitz Center for having me at this wonderful place.

First, I think it’s useful to step back and ask exactly what we mean when we speak of the decline of the West.  Do we mean a decline in raw military power, in freedom, in prosperity, standard of living, quality of life; in security,  in character, in civic virtue, in art and culture?  And when we speak of decline, are we speaking of decline relative to a decade ago, a generation, a century?  And if we are in decline, who is rising, and in what ways, and why?  And what does their rise say about the West?

For example, the rise of China as an economic power, and India as both an economic power and a fledgling democracy — maybe less a reflection of the innate qualities of Chinese or Indian civilization than of the powerful influence of Western ideas and values in those countries.  Indeed, Western civilization has become, in a very real way, world civilization.  And Western values have come to be recognized very widely as universal values.

Maybe it’s also useful to remind ourselves that people have been talking about the decline of the West for a long time.  Europe, which reached its zenith of power, [self-competence] and much else in the latter part of the 19th century, was traumatized by the First World War and, in a way, never really recovered.

During the Depression, a lot of supposedly smart people in both America and Europe thought democratic capitalism was finished and that they were faced with a choice between communism and fascism.  For awhile during World War II, things didn’t look good.  And for quite awhile afterwards, many people were betting on the USSR.

I was born into a prosperous, stable, self-confident America.  But by the time I was a teenager, the US seemed to be coming apart at the seams, frazzled by a new culture of protest that transformed American cultural values, mocked the idea of America as the arsenal of democracy and undermined American social stability.  Similar developments, of course, were going on all over Western Europe.

Then came Watergate, and we were told that American democracy was on the rocks.  President Ford reassured us, only to be replaced by Carter, who told us we were afflicted with a deadly malaise that was taking us down the tubes.  Reagan brought us Morning in America, though, at the same time, we were warned that Japan was about to leave us in the dust.

The fall of communism in Europe felt at first like a great triumph for the West.  But for many, it led to a crisis of identity.  We had to find ourselves in opposition to communism — what were we now?

Then came 9/11.  And after the initial and very brief feeling of Western unity, confusion and division set in.  And that’s something worth puzzling over.  After all, 9/11 was followed by attacks elsewhere in the West — Madrid, London.  We were all in it together.  The West should never have been more united in resolve.  But it wasn’t.  Why?  Because we’d been poisoned by a decadent thing called multiculturalism that made it impossible for many of us — especially our cultural elites — to even name our enemy.

Fear played a part too, of course.  Many European countries were already so heavily populated with Muslims, who they knew were sympathetic to jihadists, that the leaders of those countries didn’t dare talk honestly about the subject.  Our leaders sent soldiers off to fight but weren’t always honest with them about what they were fighting.

Meanwhile, Europe became increasingly accustomed to Muslim youth crime, so-called no-go zones, and fiery jihadist preachers.  But who was put on trial in Europe, in Canada and in Australia?  The few people who dared to speak bluntly and honestly about Islam.

No wonder, then, that we were plunged into confusion and division.  Not just division among Americans, but division between America and our Western allies.  During the Bush years, anti-Americanism in Europe swelled to unprecedented proportions.  Respected intellectuals equated Bush with Saddam and [Osama].  Then suddenly, China loomed as the world’s next great power, and the West became gripped by economic crises.

Today, the welfare states of Western Europe face demographic disaster.  The EU is a question mark.  And America consists increasingly — to quote Charles Murray — of two classes that don’t talk to each other.  The Tea Party grasps the importance of freedom to the West’s survival, while Occupy This-That-and-the-Other is ready to sacrifice freedom for an illusion of equality.

But what about the great majority of Americans who belong to neither movement?  To what extent do they exhibit what used to be known as civic virtues, and understand and respect the Constitutional values on which this country and the entire free West was built?  To what extent, on the other hand, are they the products of a relativist multiculturalism which has taught them that the West’s history is nothing but a litany of evils, colonialism, imperialism, exploitive capitalism; thereby twisting one of the world’s great strengths, constructive self-criticism, into a destructive self-hatred?

Instead of preparing to build on the West’s great heritage, young people are too often taught today to apologize for it.  This is no atmosphere in which to hatch new Dantes and Shakespeares, new Beethovens and Mozarts, new Rembrandts and Michelangelos.  Europe’s great cities are museums.

And speaking of culture, what about American popular culture?  I grew up in a great age of middlebrow culture which was a force for social unity that prepared young and undereducated people for the higher glories of high culture.  In the first half of the last century, American films and popular [song], at their best, were not only aesthetically meritorious but embodied admirable, even noble, values.

One of the much-discussed cultural topics in the last couple of weeks has been the disappearing taboo against the F-word in the titles of plays, movies and songs.  I don’t really care that much about the F-word.  Anybody who’s read Chaucer knows that vulgarity has been a part of English literature from the beginning.  But the kind of cultural products that have the F-word in their titles today might well have been created in order to demonstrate definitively that the West is indeed undergoing a profound decline.

Then again, these things may turn around.  We’ve faced economic and cultural setbacks before.  Plus the fact we must admit that there have been remarkable developments in our own lifetimes that we shouldn’t overlook.  Economic crisis or not, most of us are living better than ever.  We live longer than ever.  In America, many of the prejudices I grew up around have faded to a degree I never imagined possible, although the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and its appearance among the Occupy This-and-That crowd is not too heartening.

But thanks to Western science and technology, we live in a world of marvels.  Whenever I’m bored and taking for granted the everyday wonders of contemporary Western life, I look around me and ask what Benjamin Franklin would make of television, cell phones, e-mail, YouTube, Spotify and Skype.

At this point, however, I suppose I should remind you all of the subtitles of my last two books.  The subtitle of “While Europe Slept” is “How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.”  The subtitle of “Surrender” is “Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.”

These subtitles describe not only decline but destruction — the destruction first of the first freedom, freedom of speech, at least speech about Islam — a widespread submission to the tenet that Muslims have a right to see their religion treated with respect, even deference; a tendency for the cultural and intellectual world, the media establishment, political leaders at every level, the police and military, and society at large, to give in to the demands of Sharia law in a variety of ways big and small; a deep-seated reluctance on the part of authorities to face up to social problems caused by Islamization, a readiness to surrender Muslim enclaves to autocratic government by local patriarchs who follow the dictates of Sharia law.

These developments worry me deeply.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  And a native culture that doesn’t believe very much in itself and in its own values cannot survive for long against an imported culture whose members believe in their own cultural values so passionately that now a few of them are prepared to commit suicide or murder their own children in the name of those values.

To put it bluntly, I’ve seen what Islamization has done to Europe, and I’ve seen how Europe is responding, and I’ve started to see the same things happening here.  And I’m worried.

To answer the four questions with which we began directly, then — is the West in decline?  Well, I wouldn’t have written my last couple of books if I weren’t sincerely worried that it is.  At the same time, I couldn’t have written them if I didn’t think that there was hope, if we stop responding to Islam with deference and apology and appeasement.

What can be done to reverse the trend?  Educate our next generation to know Western history, to cherish Western liberty and appreciate the sacrifices of those who bequeathed it to us to practice Western values of discipline, hard work, economic responsibility, sacrifice, tolerance and intelligent self-criticism; to recognize that they are mere stewards of the treasure that is Western civilization, and to be prepared to defend it with their lives.

Finally, the last question — are you optimistic, or pessimistic?  Well, as I think I’ve made it clear, that varies.  When I’m attending a political debate in Europe, where everybody sounds as if they’re living on another planet than I am, I’m overcome with despair.  When I’m in a place like this, which is itself a reminder of the glories that America and the West are capable of, and where I’m in the company of people who obviously get it, I feel a spark of optimism.  So thank you for that.

(Applause)

Michael Wienir: Thank you very much.  The worst job trying to moderate is trying to keep people to 10 minutes.  But everybody has so many wonderful things to say, and [yeah, that stinks].  Have your questions ready for all these panelists.

Next panelist is Paul Vallely.  Paul is a retired United States major-general, a graduate of West Point.  His training includes — and you can look at his lapel, because he’s got a whole bunch of these buttons on there — infantry, Rangers, Airborne, jumpmaster, command, general staff schools — he’s been to all those.  He’s got experience at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the Army War College.  He was deputy commanding general of the Pacific Command when he retired in 1993.

In 2004, with our friend, retired Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, he wrote a book called “The End Game” — which he presented at one of our sessions — “A Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.”  He has served as a senior military analyst for Fox News, Military Committee Chairman of the Center for Security Policy — Frank Gaffney is around here someplace to say hello to — he has supported Veteran Defenders of America.  And he founded a wonderful organization called Stand Up America, supporting the First and Second Amendments, strong national defense, secure borders, personal responsibility, individual liberty and limited government.

He’s been a contributor to FrontPageMag.com and has been a long-term friend of mine and a long-term friend of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Paul?

(Applause)

Paul Vallely: Thank you very much, Michael.  Good morning, everybody.  We came from Montana two days ago, it was nine degrees.

(Laughter)

So even if it’s raining outside, it’s wonderful.  And I’ve got my nurse’s assistant here, Muffin, who you’ll get to meet.

(Applause)

Michael Ledeen and I won’t cover with you all of our medical problems last year, but it really put us out of action for a while.  But we’re standing, Michael, and we’re here with all of you.  Wonderful friends, you know, we’ve known you for so long now.  Years.  And it’s always a pleasure, and appreciate when Michael and David invite us to be a part of this each and every year.

Stand Up America, just to tell you a little bit — we have 16 research intelligence analysts that work for us around the United States.  And that’s what’s the basis of us being able to produce and publish a lot of articles that are pertinent to the subjects that we’ll be discussing this weekend.

But specifically, let me try to address the decline of the West and answer the questions, Michael, as best I can.  But certainly, we really want to have a heavy question-and-answer period, where we can get more into the Middle East and more specificity of some of the major issues that we’re looking at today.

But you know, when you look historically back — and I learned as a cadet at West Point, when we studied all the great battles — all the revolutions that had taken place, the tactics and the strategies that were used to restore a society or a culture — we certainly have to look at what were the root causes of the decline.  And if you typically look back at revolutions and the demise of empires, the fall of empires over the centuries, you will see it comes back basically — something has happened in that culture with those people, from tyrannical governments, dictatorial governments.  And it comes down a lot to the economics, and what kind of pain that is placed on any kind of society.

So when we look at what’s happening around the world — and I’ll talk more specifically about it, and what I call a chessboard, the international global chessboard, to lay out exactly how we see things as the world exists today.  But examining the past again, and reflecting — yes, we have been in a decline.

If you track back culturally in America, I can track it back to the ’60s.  And then, when we look at the financial — the stability of our markets over a period of time.  But mixed in with that was the innovation of America, and the high-technology developments.  So as a decline occurred in certain parts of our structure, even the political decline of effective leadership over the years, effective government.

So you tie all of those things in together while you’re trying out there in the private sector, and those that do have common sense and are innovative, to be creating products, activities, corporations and organizations — really still today, that’s the glue that’s holding us together.

We did a strategic study — we completed it two months ago.  I’ll be happy to provide you a copy of it.  But guess what the four or five major threats to America are, when we look at this decline?  Number one, the greatest threat to America is an inept and a dysfunctional government.  Okay, think about that.  The second major threat in the decline — as we’ve seen, and we’re experiencing right now — is the financial collapse of the United States and the Western countries.  Third, the greatest threat was our southern borders and our borders.  The fourth was Iran and what’s happening in the Middle East.  And fifth was Afghanistan and Pakistan.  So when you analyze that, and you talk about the decline politically, when you look at a dysfunctional government that we have so bureaucratized, and we’ve so over legislated, then our hands are almost tied.

So the question is, as we come back — what are the solutions?  And I call it the restoration.  As we’ve seen a decline now with still a strengthening of the glue within the American society, still with many of us having what I call the warrior spirit, the ability to restore the Constitution, the ability to restore the republic, and get back to the basic values and traditions — that’s how you get after the root cause.

But let me tell you a little bit of difference. As you restore, and as countries, as societies, restore themselves after tremendous upheaval and tremendous pain, it all comes back to superb leadership.  But above that — I define it even further — is the warrior.  And the difference between warriors and leaders — warriors will fall on their sword.  I will die for you, I will die for your children, to restore this country and to make it what it should be today to deal with today and tomorrow.

So we all need to have that warrior spirit.  Because, as Herman Cain pointed out, we are in the battle for America.  It’s not business as usual.  This is a different situation in 2011, going into 2012.  And your neighbors, your local communities, have to realize they’ve got to get out of their bubble.

I talked to 60 corporate leaders yesterday.  Honest to goodness, I couldn’t believe it.  It’s like they’re all in their corporate bubble, except for a few.  And I find that amongst many intelligent, educated individuals.  So in this restoration, to go from the decline that we’ve seen across the board to restoration now, and coming back up — and Michael Ledeen and I talked earlier this morning — we want to be on a positive note.

Yes, we have to look at the threats out there.  We have to understand that we’ve got to have a government, we’ve got to have an organization within this country, that can meet those threats.  Because listen, you can talk about unemployment, you can talk about economics, you can talk about all those other issues out there.  They mean nothing, unless we can secure you and your families.  The security of you and your families is the utmost important thing we can do.  Because once we have the security of America, we have strong leadership and we have strong warriors leading our country, we can do anything.  And that’s the key to it all.

So within my 10 minutes, that’s it.  And very happy to address the Middle East and some other things.

(Applause)

Michael Wienir: That was exciting.  That’s less than 10 minutes.  So lots of questions.

I’m looking at my introduction to Michael Ledeen, which has just been edited, which is a good thing.

(Laughter)

Michael is a noted political analyst.  He was Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked for over 20 years.  He’s now the Freedom Scholar chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  He was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.  He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News; and was a consultant to the National Security Council, Department of Defense and Department of State.

His books include “Grave New World,” “Tocqueville on American Character,” “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership,” and, in 2007, “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.”

Michael Ledeen.

(Applause)

Michael Ledeen: Thank you, Michael.  It’s great to be on a panel with another Michael and two Bruces.

(Laughter)

When I was a teenager, the Bruce was one of my heroes.  There was a radio show in New York that was run by a DJ called Bruce, and I thought it was great.

Good morning. Happy Friday to all of you.

I’m a historian.  I have a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin, about which you’ve all heard.  And it was great to get a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin because there was real debate.  We fought with each other every day about almost everything.  And I think everybody who came out of that program in those years came out toughened by it.

But I stress to you that I’m a historian, not a prophet.  So I will say to you what I say to the young kids that I work with at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — that we don’t know.  We don’t know if America is in decline or on the rise.  Nobody knows.  Most things that people talk about — that we talk about, that pundits write about, and on which they pronounce all the time — are unknowable.  We won’t know for quite awhile whether we’re rising or falling, how our enemies are doing, and so forth.

There have been — if you go back and read cultural history, the conviction that America has been in decline starts the day after Plymouth Rock.  Europeans said about Americans from the beginning that America was created by failed people and biological rejects –

(Laughter)

– that America — no, really.  Scientific essays on how Americans were shorter than Europeans and weaker than Europeans, and more prone to disease than Europeans, and so forth — we’ve always been written off.  And there’s a whole strain in American intellectual history that of course rewards this point of view.  And intellectuals in particular love it.  Because the real secret about American intellectuals is that they’re miserably unhappy because they’re not Europeans.

(Laughter)

And European intellectuals are on top of the status heap.  They get good salaries, they get high prestige, they’re on television all the time.  People bow to them, people respect them, pretty women run after them — or pretty men, depending.

(Laughter)

And it’s a great life.  And over here, you know, Americans by and large really don’t give a damn about intellectuals.  And the way the — the adjectives we applied to them, as in pointy-headed, et cetera –

(Laughter)

– show all of this.  And when I was in college, there was a very famous book emerge by Professor Hofstadter at Columbia University, called “The Anti-Intellectual Tradition in American Life,” which went through all of this stuff.  And that book was obviously intended to show us how terrible all of this was.  And it’s only later in life that I came to realize that it was a very good thing, this anti-intellectual tradition.

So I say all this in order to stress — we don’t know.  We don’t know how it’s all going to turn out.  However, if you look at it from the standpoint of global conflict — us against them — there’s every reason to be not only optimistic, but even wildly optimistic.

The first important point is the basic fact of American history in the world.  We have always been [saved] by our enemies.  We have never intervened in a global matter because we figured it out, because we thought we were at risk, and we acted to save us, our values, our allies, et cetera.  Never.

We were torpedoed into the First World War in the North Atlantic by the Germans.  We were providentially bombed into World War II just in the nick of time by the Japanese.  We were dragged kicking and screaming into the Cold War by Stalin, who just couldn’t wait to get his fangs into Greece and Turkey at the end of the war, and to gobble up all the satellites in Central and Eastern Europe, at which point we had to do something.  So the Cold War — we were a reluctant, very reluctant, participant.  And the so-called war against terror — the evil phrase we are not even permitted to pronounce anymore — was famously something that we didn’t choose; they chose us on 11th of September, 2001.

So we rely on our enemies.  And on this you can be prophetically sound.  Because our enemies will attack us, they have to attack us, they will continue to attack us.  And so eventually, some American President will get up one day and say — you know, we really have to do something.

And I will say only one line about that.  We are — Barbara and I have three children, all of whom have served in this war, two of whom are male marine officers, one of whom is in Afghanistan today.  And on the subject of Iran, where the entire debate involves around nukes — should we let them have nukes, can they be permitted to have nukes, is it acceptable, tolerable, et cetera — the fact of the matter is that the Iranians kill Americans every day.  Let me say it again — Iranians kill Americans every day.  Nobody cares.  Only the military guys care.  And for the most part, they’re muzzled by the politicians.  So I just want to put that out there.

So what are we facing, and what is the threat to us?  We’re facing a corrupt elite here at home, both political and intellectual.  The theme of universities, as Bruce Bawer said, is absolutely central to the success of the United States.  And success of universities means — the word they use but don’t mean, which is “diversity” — intellectual diversity.

The really great thing about David Horowitz, who I’ve known for very long time — but I mean, the greatest thing about David Horowitz is that he has gone onto university campuses and fought for intellectual diversity.  That is to say you have to have debates on campus.  Our children have to hear every issue argued out.  They have to hear why people believe things that we don’t, and why people believe things that we do.  They have to hear the full range of debate.  They’re not getting it.

College campuses are boring today.  Their monolithic, they’re heteronomic, and they [hand to] the left.  And so they don’t hear the range of discussion.  That’s stultifying.  That’s bad for what America needs most of all, which is creativity, energy, self confidence and so forth.

I have an answer to — was it Paul’s remark — what is China?  Totalitarian mercantilism, which is a great phrase that I’m going to steal and plagiarize and use often in the future.  I never heard it before, but I love it.

(Laughter)

China is the world’s first mature fascist dictatorship.  It’s what happens when the ideology burns out, and you’re left with this kind of structure, with the remnants of a kind of traditional racism.  That’s what China is today.  China now has legitimized private property, certain amount of private business, a lot of what we would call crony capitalism.  But China certainly no longer has any vestige of communist state, nor do they talk about revolution anymore, communist or otherwise.  It’s now an imperial power trying to expand its outreach.

And I will tell you, without taking any particular pleasure in it, that that system, as all [subsystems], are in a terrible crisis.  Because as Machiavelli said, quite rightly — almost everything accurately said was quite right — but one of his central themes is that tyranny is the most unstable of all forms of government.  Tyranny is the least likely to last a long time.  The most likely to last a long time is what we’ve got — a mixed system, a mixed Constitution.

A just released book, “Bowing to Beijing” by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II, will change forever the way you think about China — even if, like me, you already have the deepest worries about the Chinese threat. As I opened the book, I was expecting to find many useful examples of Chinese military and industrial efforts to get the better of the United States and the West.

Indeed, there are 100 pages of examples of the most remorseless Chinese successes at stealing the military and industrial secrets of the West and converting them into a growing menace — soon to be a leviathan — bent on domination and defeat of America. The authors itemize the sheer, unprecedented magnitude of this effort. But the opening chapters dealt with human rights abuses, and my first thought as I started reading was that I wanted to get right to the military and industrial examples.

But the authors were right to lead with 50 pages itemizing in grizzly detail Chinese human rights abuses — for the profound reason that after reading those first 50 pages, the reader will be impassioned to resist Chinese domination not only on behalf of American interests, but also for the sake of humanity.

Today, many people think America is in decline and mentally acquiesce to the thought that the rise of China is inevitable. Those 50 pages will stiffen your resolve to be part of the struggle to never let such a malignancy spread to the rest of the world — let alone to America. One of the authors, Brett Decker, is a friend — and I have never been more proud of his (and his co-author’s) accomplishment of providing such a deep moral vision in this carefully factual book.

In an astounding narrative, Decker and Triplett have refuted the growing authoritarian temptation expressed for too many elite people around the world by Thomas Friedman, the senior New York Times foreign-policy columnist who wrote recently: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

The authors do not mention Friedman. In those first 50 pages, they focus their compelling narrative on a strictly factual expose of the moral horror being brought down on the Chinese people by their ever-more-powerful Chinese leadership.

The authors carefully delineate the reversal in the last decade of the previous modest Chinese movement toward rule of law and a small hint at decency. It had been the hope of everyone from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger onward that as China came into the world and embraced capitalism it would become “a modern, progressive society that (would) eventually bring the communist state in line with the rest of the civilized world.” That was the moral foundation for “engaging” with China.

It was also a convenient rationalization for trying to make a fortune in the vast Chinese market.

Speaking from the lush Hawaiian venue of the Asia-Pacific economic summit, Obama falsely claimed during a televised news conference on November 13th that “we are in a much stronger position now than we were two or three years ago with respect to Iran.”

The truth is precisely the opposite. Iran poses a graver and more immediate danger to world peace and security, and to the security of the U.S. homeland, than ever before. Iran is moving, virtually unimpeded, ever closer to developing nuclear arms capability. Iran is also planning, or already building, at least one missile base in Venezuela, which will be equipped with medium-range missiles capable of reaching the United States mainland.

Moreover, Iran has announced that it will send its warships to establish a presence along the marine border with the eastern and southern coasts of the United States. Iranian Rear Adm. Seyed Mahmoud Mousavi said in July 2011 that its frigates and destroyers have been equipped with “surface-to-surface missiles.”

Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and military reach have extended beyond the Middle East, including to the Western Hemisphere. Its Quds forces, along with Hezbollah cells, are using Venezuela as a base from which to expand their activities throughout Latin America and to form collaborations with drug cartels in Mexico, for the purpose of infiltrating the United States through its porous southern border. And let’s not forget the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

All of these serious provocations are happening during Obama’s watch. His appeasement policies, including his naive engagement-without-conditions approach to negotiating with Iran, have exacerbated the dangers.

Valuable time was lost as Obama continued his quixotic quest for unconditional talks with Iranian officials. And when there was a real opportunity for regime change during the Iranian “Green Movement” uprising against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election in June 2009, Obama was AWOL.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations watchdog body dealing with nuclear power security, issued an alarming report last week with more detailed evidence than ever before that Iran is working toward developing a nuclear bomb capability. The report laid out information on the secretive Iranian program to enrich uranium, its development of a payload system to carry a nuclear weapon on a missile, and the computer modeling and testing of high explosives to trigger a nuclear device.

According to an ex-CIA agent, who had penetrated inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian regime “now has enough enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs.” Other more conservative experts have said that Iran now has the capability to make weapon-grade uranium and build at least one atomic weapon within six months. Either way, we are clearly running out of time to stop Iran from becoming a full-fledged nuclear arms power.

What has been Obama’s public response? More sanctions on top of the ones that have not stopped Iran’s progress. Obama even lauded Russia and China for standing with the United States in support of the past ineffective sanctions approved by the United Nations Security Council, and held out the hope for a continued unified approach to Iran.

“When I came into office, the world was divided and Iran was unified around its nuclear program,” Obama said at his news conference. “We now have a situation where the world is united and Iran is isolated.  And because of our diplomacy and our efforts, we have, by far, the strongest sanctions on Iran that we’ve ever seen.  And China and Russia were critical to making that happen.”

Referring to the Russian and Chinese presidents with whom he met at the Asia-Pacific summit, Obama said that he spoke with “President Medvedev, as well as President Hu, and all three of us entirely agree on the objective, which is making sure that Iran does not weaponize nuclear power and that we don’t trigger a nuclear arms race in the region. That’s in the interests of all of us.”

What Obama failed to mention is that Russia in particular opposes any further sanctions or other punitive measures against Iran. In fact, Russia was angry that the IAEA report was even made public. A statement issued by the Foreign Ministry said that the report was “nothing but an intentional — and counterproductive — whipping up of emotions.”

It is not a cause the leftist ‘Occupy Wall Street’ crowd would ever espouse, since its life-or-death issues would shame theirs and show where true evil and oppression resides.

Largely ignored by the Western media, nine Tibetan Buddhist monks and one nun have attempted suicide by self-immolation since last March in China’s eastern Sichuan province, a hotbed of unrest against perceived Chinese government oppression. Eastern Sichuan is largely inhabited by ethnic Tibetans and was once historically part of Tibet.

It is unknown how many of the ten perished in their suicide attempts, since Chinese authorities never say whether a monk survived. But it is believed five have died from their injuries, the nun, Tengzin Wangmo, 20, being one of them. The latest attempted self-immolation, reported by the Free Tibet group, occurred only last week outside a monastery in Ganzi in Sichuan, when a monk set himself alight after dousing himself with an accelerant. It is also not known whether he survived.

“The unrest in Tibet is escalating and widening,” said Stephanie Brigden of Free Tibet. “The number and frequency of self-immolations is unprecedented.”

The latest fatality, whose name is unknown, is the eighth Buddhist monk to attempt suicide by fire in the past two months. This increase in self-immolation numbers indicates the Tibetans’ level of desperation and despair concerning the survival of their people, culture and religion, which they see threatened by Han Chinese immigration and repressive government measures. Beijing gained control of Tibet, which is now labelled an autonomous region, after it successfully invaded its neighbour in 1950.

Self-immolations, like those occurring in Tibet, are a sign of a people reaching the end of its tether. It is the only weapon the powerless and brutalised Tibetans feel they have left that could make a difference against a monstrous dictatorship that has already murdered 70 million people. The employment of this ultimate measure is also an indication that Tibetans believe their situation and conditions are becoming so hopeless, they would rather perish than continue living in their present state.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, self-immolations also occurred in European communist countries to protest the unbearable and horrific results of decades of socialism. A self-immolation also triggered the ‘Arab Spring’ when a man set himself alight in Tunisia to protest bureaucratic corruption. While it is doubtful whether the recent self-immolations of Buddhist spirituals will lead to such regime-changing events, especially in the face of continued, massive Chinese police oppression, Brigden believes they are sparking discontent.

“The acts of self-immolation are not taking place in isolation, protests have been reported in the surrounding region and calls for wider protests are growing,” she said.

The center of the recent Tibetan suicide protests, and of anti-Beijing sentiment in general, is the Kirti monastery in eastern Sichuan. The majority of monks involved in the fiery suicide attempts this year were from Kirti, the first one taking place last March. The monk was 16-years-old. Two other Kirti monks, accused of assisting with the March attempt, were both given long jail terms.

Before the self-immolations, the Kirti monastery had a population of 2,500 monks; that has now dwindled to 600 due to arrests, police persecution and “brutal” security raids.” With police now stationed inside the monastery itself, the religious institution is reported to have been turned into “a virtual prison.” Several hundred monks may also have been sent away for “patriotic re-education.”