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.”

The Pentagon’s annual review of Beijing’s military power paints the picture of a nation eager to challenge the United States in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, and Washington’s apparent willingness to try to balance the federal budget on the backs of the Armed Forces paints the picture of a nation that will be unprepared to meet that challenge.

According to the Pentagon report, “by the latter half of the current decade, China will likely be able to project and sustain a modest-sized force, perhaps several battalions of ground forces or a naval flotilla of up to a dozen ships, in low-intensity operations far from China. This evolution will lay the foundation for a force able to accomplish a broader set of regional and global objectives.” In conjunction with its buildup of these ground, sea and air assets, Beijing is building aerospace and cyberspace capabilities to wage—or at least to threaten—asymmetrical war against the United States.

In short, in the span of a decade or so, China’s military has evolved from a 1960s-vintage territorial army barely able to defend its coastal areas into an increasingly high-tech, power-projecting force with global reach and global ambitions.

DoD estimates China’s “total military-related spending for 2010 was over $160 billion.” With those financial resources, “China is developing measures to deter or counter third-party intervention, including by the United States.” Among China’s growing arsenal of anti-access weapons are anti-ship missiles with a range exceeding 1,500 km, upgraded B-6 bombers armed with a new long-range cruise missile, an emerging aircraft-carrier capability, and 75 surface combatants, more than 60 submarines and 85 missile-equipped small boats. All of these are aimed at dissuading the United States from getting involved in areas of interest to China—and ultimately chasing the United States out of the Asia-Pacific region.

Although the DoD reports that “China has settled eleven land disputes with six of its neighbors since 1998,” it adds that China has “maritime boundary disputes with Japan, and throughout the South China Sea with Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Taiwan.” These disputes are highlighted by almost-weekly headlines detailing Chinese bullying on the high seas.

Adm. Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, adds that “the scope and pace of…modernization without clarity on China’s ultimate goals remains troubling. For example, China continues to accelerate its offensive air and missile developments without corresponding public clarification about how these forces will be utilized. Of particular concern is the expanding inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles (which include anti-ship capability) and the development of modern, fourth- and fifth-generation stealthy combat aircraft.”

This article is cross-posted at LisaGraas.com

When Nixon went to China in 1972, I was a very impressionable and inquisitive five-year-old who was captivated by the news reports about the leader of our country visiting this distant and fascinating land. Understanding that America and China had long experienced tension with each other, and alienation, Nixon’s visit had as great an impact on me as the moon landing had for children three years previously. Because the China visit was all I knew of him, Henry Kissinger, the man with the German accent who had facilitated the trip on behalf of our country was, to me, as marvelous as many schoolchildren deemed the astronauts of Apollo 11 to be. So it is that I did feel quite honored to receive an advance copy of Kissinger’s new book “On China“, a thorough overview of China’s relationship with the world from ancient times through today based on Henry Kissinger’s studies of Chinese history and his personal experiences in fifty visits to the country.

Though Kissinger was something of a hero to me all those years ago, that was then. This is now. Today, the world seems smaller geographically, but even larger in its difficulties, some of which may or may not be attributed to the diplomatic mechanisms of Henry Kissinger. Certainly, Kissinger left a large footprint in the area of American foreign policy, particularly in our dealings with China. That is precisely why his book is such an important contribution to the study of history. Certainly, it is a book that should be read by anyone who desires to have a good understanding of China’s place in the world, regardless of what one thinks of Mr. Kissinger.

One of the most important things I learned from the book was the insight given on how the people of China have viewed their nation and its place in the world over the centuries. We are certainly remiss if we do not take into account their points of view as we continue to engage in the important task of contributing to peace and stability in the world. Kissinger, however, is an icon of Realpolitik, and this shows through not only in how he handled relations with China, but also in how he wrote the book. It lacks condemnations of evil, but thankfully, also lacks support for evil. The thoroughly amoral nature of the book left me feeling very uncomfortable at times. Treating things like the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion and Mao’s intent to destroy all things Confucian (not to mention his disregard for human life) as mere data for our consideration of how things were, as if they had no moral dimension, was rather shocking to me. An exchange between President Gerald Ford, Chairman Mao, and Henry Kissinger, left me utterly bewildered as it indicated to me that Mao — who ruled by terror and murdered millions — was more interested in God than Kissinger was.

MAO: Your Secretary of State has been interfering in my internal affairs.

FORD: Tell me about it.

MAO: He does not allow me to go and meet God. He even tells me to disobey the order that God has given to me. God has sent me an invitation,yet he [Kissinger] says, don’t go.

KISSINGER: That would be too powerful a combination if he went there.

MAO: He is an atheist [Kissinger]. He is opposed to God. And he is also undermining my relations with God. He is a very ferocious man and I have no other recourse than to obey his orders.

In regard to readibility, the book is a quick read in places and laborious in others. Kissinger does a good job of leaving nothing unsaid when it comes to the cold, hard facts of China’s history of foreign policy, and the book flows easily from topic to topic, with short chapters packed with information. I have no doubt that “On China“ will be widely considered as one of the most important books on foreign policy ever written.

For more reviews of this book, visit TLC Book Tours.

This article is cross-posted at LisaGraas.com

The UN Security Council approved a resolution yesterday (Wednesday, June 9th) imposing a fourth round of sanctions on Iran in response to its continued nuclear enrichment program, which is in violation of prior Security Council resolutions.  The vote was 12 in favor, 2 against (Brazil and Turkey) and 1 abstention (Lebanon).  The new resolution imposes new financial restrictions on Iran, expands an existing arms embargo, and authorizes a greater capacity to stop and search Iranian cargo ships. Targeted sanctions on specific individuals and entities were expanded. The resolution also includes measures directed against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

While the United States, Great Britain, and France were the resolution’s strongest sponsors, China and Russia also expressed their verbal support along with their votes — although the Russian ambassador added a major caveat in his response to a reporter’s question about Russia’s prospective sale of a sophisticated anti-aircraft system to Iran.

Lebanon’s decision to abstain was a pleasant surprise, considering the influence of Iran-backed Hezbollah in the Lebanese government. Brazil and Turkey, as expected, opposed the new resolution on the grounds that it could undermine a proposed nuclear fuel swap between Iran and the two countries. They seemed to forget that the European Union has been trying to negotiate with Iran since 2005 and the Obama administration waited 18 months while trying to engage Iran before seeking passage of this resolution.  Only when new sanctions became a real possibility did Iran come around to the fuel swap concept that it had first agreed upon and then promptly reneged on last fall.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters after the vote that the “resolution is strong, it’s tough and it’s comprehensive. And it is something that Iran fought very hard to prevent passage today. The effort, the time, the money, and the poise that they employed to try to prevent this resolution’s passage only underscores their understanding, that this is a major blow.”

Despite the ineffectiveness of the three prior resolutions, Ambassador Rice expressed confidence that the cumulative effect on Iran of all the resolutions is “harmful and hurtful.”

Iran remains unbowed. Its representative told the Security Council after the vote that it had no intention of changing its present course. He accused the United States and Great Britain in particular of continuing a long pattern of interference in Iran’s affairs and displaying a double standard vis-a-vis Israel. Ambassador Rice told reporters that these comments were “reprehensible, offensive, and inaccurate.”

On paper at least, the new resolution does appear to represent a significant move forward from the prior three. More specifically, the resolution prohibits Iran from investing in sensitive nuclear activities abroad, like uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, as well as activities involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. The ban also applies to investment in uranium mining.

States are prohibited from selling or in any way transferring to Iran various categories of heavy weapons (battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and certain missiles or missile systems). States are similarly prohibited from providing technical or financial assistance for such systems, or spare parts.

The resolution also sets up a new cargo inspection framework. States are expected to inspect any vessel on their territory suspected of carrying prohibited cargo, including banned conventional arms or sensitive nuclear or missile items. States are also expected to cooperate in such inspections on the high seas.

States are called upon to prevent any financial service and to freeze any asset that could contribute to Iran’s proliferation.

Most significantly, the resolution targets the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for its role in proliferation and requires states to mandate that businesses exercise vigilance over all transactions involving the IRGC. Fifteen IRGC-related companies linked to proliferation will have their assets frozen. The IRGC is the major power center in Iran’s economic and military spheres as well as one of the government’s primary instruments for suppressing political dissent. Impairing the IRGC’s freedom of operations will be a significant accomplishment, if successful.

UN Security Council sanctions resolutions against pre-liberation Iraq, North Korea, and Iran have had a bad track record in actual practice. The resolutions have been easy for the sanctioned countries to evade through the use of multiple front entities, money laundering and trading partners unwilling to give up short term advantage for longer term peace and security.

Also, enforcement of the cargo inspection at sea will be a challenge if Iran, as expected, refuses to cooperate. When the French UN ambassador, for example, was asked what measures France would be willing to take in such a scenario, he refused to answer what he called a “hypothetical question.”

Most ominously, the Russian UN ambassador told reporters that Russia did not consider the sale of its sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran to be within the resolution’s scope. The S-300 missile defense system would no doubt be used by Iran to shield its nuclear sites against a potential air strike, should military force become necessary to stop Iran from producing nuclear bombs. The Russian ambassador is technically correct because the resolution’s ban on the transfer to Iran of certain missile systems is written in such a way that it creates a big loophole for Russia to walk through in delivering to Iran its ground-to-air missiles, including its S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and anti-missile interceptors.

The Obama administration will spin the latest sanctions resolution against Iran as a major diplomatic triumph and a significant obstacle in the way of Iran’s progress towards achieving nuclear arms capability.  But  until the S-300 loophole is closed, until the U.S. and its allies figure out a way to effectively stop evasions of the sanctions, and until enough countries show that they are willing to enforce the cargo inspections, the Obama administration might want to wait before it celebrates.

Nah, just kidding.  Here he is on Flotilla-Gate, siding with the enemies of civilization, as usual:

I am anxious not to be overly judgmental in telling Israel exactly what to do. I think it’s in many ways they’re business.

Hold it, Cal, that doesn’t sound so bad to me.  Maybe the NRB crew has been too tough on him. Just wait, grasshopper…

But it’s our business because we are, not only very close allies of Israel, we finance Israel, so any weapon they use, ship they own, or plane they own, or any threat they make, we back them up.

Ah, now there’s the Crazy Uncle Ron we all know and love!  For just how much we “back up” Israel these days, click here and here.  Or maybe here.  Then again, you could also click here, or perhaps here…

We back them up on this embargo preventing food and medicine going into Gaza.  So we’re morally responsible and people see us as one and the same.  So-but I think this is atrocious. But I think sanctions and embargos and boycotts preventing goods from going in is actually an act of war, so this is why recently a few of us voted against sanctions against the Iranians…it’s absolutely wrong to prevent people that are starving and having problems, almost like in concentration camps, and saying, ‘yes, we endorse this whole concept that we can’t allow ships to go in there in a humanitarian way.

If you, unlike the Congressman from Texas’s 14^th District, feel the slightest sense of obligation to inform yourself about the facts of any given situation before opening your mouth (and feel obliged to tell the truth about those facts once you do know them), you’d know this is all bogus: the blockade was born out of legitimate and urgent security concerns, the IDF has been letting humanitarian aid through, and Gaza’s “concentration camp”-like conditions have been vastly exaggerated.

How did Paul react when Don Imus pointed this out?

Well, they’re [Hamas] an elected government, I mean, Hamas? We have thousands of our soldiers dying to say that we want elections, and we want democracy, so we finally get one in Palestine, and they elect Hamas, and then all of a sudden, ‘oh, you elected the wrong people! [laughs] So, you’re not legitimate, you stole the government!’ Well, our CIA, when we have elections, frequently rig elections, and is Karzai a truly elected leader of Afghanistan? He’s a puppet. So this whole notion that we should die for spreading democracy and then when we get democracy we undermine it. I mean, this all started back in the fifties when Mossadegh was elected as a legitimate democratic leader of Iran, and we went, and our CIA, that was our beginning of the CIA overthrowing governments, and we got rid of him.

Note well that none of this addresses Imus’s question.  However overly optimistic some may have been about the power of elections to transform the Middle East, or whatever the CIA did or didn’t do in the past (and beware taking Uncle Ron at face value when it comes to history), it’s all immaterial to whether or not Paul’s initial characterization of the situation was accurate.  It’s clearly not, but Paul doesn’t seem to care.

This, along with his overall record of lying on behalf of anti-liberty Islamic bigots, more than proves that reasonable, informed people can no longer claim in good conscience that Ron Paul is an honest man who can be trusted to accurately assess foreign policy questions. (This, of course, makes him ultimately unreliable in any policy area.)

They’re probably not the best people in the world, but, y’know, didn’t we talk to the Soviets?  They weren’t very good people. We talked to the Chinese over the years, and they were thugs. And yet, in talking to them and dealing with these countries like China, actually our relationships have improved. So this whole idea that we have absolute control over people in Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank, I don’t think that’s right.

“Not the best people”?!  Rod Blagojevich and Paris Hilton “aren’t the best people.” Hamas are monsters.  It’s not as if the two governments disagree on an issue or two, or they just had some trade agreements that went sour.  6,000 rockets since 2007, murderous & bigoted children’s television, and their very charter committed to Israel’s destruction; doesn’t any of this qualify as “an act of war” in Paul’s mind?  Who’s calling for “absolute control over” the Palestinians? Further, where does Paul draw the line regarding what talking to one’s enemies can and can’t accomplish? (Then again, the decade the free world spent talking to Saddam Hussein worked out pretty well, so maybe Paul’s on to – oh, wait.  No it didn’t…)

If Hamas’s current aggression doesn’t justify military force and skepticism toward negotiations, it’s hard to imagine what would persuade Paul to give Israel the green light—or whether or not he feels Israel is entitled to any options other than “surrender” and “die.”

Paulestinians relentlessly boast that Ron Paul is Congress’s last true conservative, but nothing could be further from the truth.  His refusal to make moral distinctions between fundamentally unlike states and his childlike faith in talking to evil plant him firmly on the hard Left.  The Right indulges such immoral nonsense at America’s peril.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

Vice President Joe Biden, wrong on virtually every major foreign policy issue since his election to the Senate in 1972, nailed this one: He warned that actors on the international stage would test the new, inexperienced President.

He knew that President Barack Obama’s enemies would perceive his strength-through-peace (versus peace-through-strength) approach as weakness. They do and are acting accordingly.

Candidate Obama vowed to hold high-level talks with Iran and North Korea without “preconditions.” Obama promised a “reset” of all things President George W. Bush, with no more talk of “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reneged on the promised missile shield defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. He waits for countries like China and Russia, both of which have business interests in Iran, to agree to “tough, crippling” sanctions.

The President dropped the term “war on terror” and refuses to call Islamofascists “Islamofascists.” He apologetically says America is vital in maintaining world peace “whether we like it or not.” He sent a videotaped message to Iran telling of our willingness to re-engage the country — if only it would unclench its fist. It unclenched more time for Iran to pursue a nuclear bomb. The administration was painfully slow to acknowledge that the Times Square truck bomb attempt involved foreign Islamic terrorists.

The administration chastised Israel for settlement construction in an area of east Jerusalem that President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush and even Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat assumed would be part of Israel in any peace agreement. During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit, Obama treated him worse than a White House dinner gate-crasher.

How’s the hope and change working out?

North Korea, in an act of war, sank a South Korean ship. Iran may now have sufficient materiel and technical knowledge to build a nuclear bomb. The Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah — under the nose of United Nations “peacekeepers” — continues to stock southern Lebanon with weapons that threaten Israel.

Now comes the anti-Israel “humanitarian” flotilla.

After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, the terror group Hamas seized power. Israel and Egypt began a naval blockade of ships in and out of Gaza. Though Israel had uprooted every Israeli settler from Gaza, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel, a bombardment that continues today.

Israel already sends humanitarian aid into Gaza and allows others to do so.

Israel even agreed to allow the supposed humanitarian flotilla cargo to enter, provided Israeli security could check it for weapons. And never mind that some of the flotilla’s “humanitarian activists” appear to have ties to terror organizations.

The flotilla’s attempt to run the blockade resulted in nine deaths when the Israeli military boarded ships to inspect the cargo. As Israel’s enemies hoped, Israel stands accused of a “disproportionate” response.

But why the flotilla now?

The most significant intervening event is the election of President Obama. Now Israel’s most important ally considers Israeli intransigence the principal obstacle to peace with the Palestinians in particular and in the Middle East in general. The activists got the message: Israel is on the defensive.

Israel, with good reason, feels alone.

Obama, like Bush in his second term, seems willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran — even as Iran threatens Israel with annihilation. Obama apparently considers a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable, even if it ignites a regional nuclear arms race — since Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan fear Iran more than they do Israel.

Give Obama credit for continuing many of Bush’s policies. Gitmo remains open, the administration finally understanding that the prison exists for a reason. He continued rendition, the terror surveillance program and the increased use of drone predators in Pakistan. He used the same “state secrets” argument to fight courtroom disclosure of sources and methods. He increased troop strength in Afghanistan and continues the Bush “clear and hold” strategy for that country and Iraq.

But Jimmy Carter governed as a strength-through-peace president. He pressured the Shah of Iran to release “political prisoners.” The shah was toppled, only to be followed by the repressive and threatening Islamic Republic of Iran. Carter urged Americans to abandon their “inordinate fear of communism.” Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev considered Carter weak and rewarded him by invading Afghanistan. This triggered a chain reaction from which the world continues to suffer. The Arabs and Muslims who fought to expel the Soviet Union then turned on the United States and the West in a grand plan for an Islamic world.

Israel’s response to the flotilla was an act of self-defense. The Western world’s reaction has been shameful. Western countries once again fail to distinguish the arsonist from the firefighter.

In 1962, the United States imposed a naval blockade — a “quarantine” — on Cuba. What would we have done to a “humanitarian” flotilla determined to help Fidel Castro place Soviet missiles 90 miles from Florida?

Larry Elder is a syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author. His latest book, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” is available now. To find out more about Larry Elder, visit his Web page at www.WeveGotACountryToSave.com.

In the post-American world, a convoy of war ships trussed up as a "flotilla" is affectionately called "humanitarian aid." And now the world is demanding a full-on "investigation" of Israel's defensive action.

I asked former UN Ambassador John Bolton for his take on it. He said, "How Obama reacts in the UN Security Council and more generally will say a lot about his views on Israel."

You gotta love how post-American Obama was so quick to call policeman James Crowley "stupid," motivated by racism in the Gates affair, but when Jewish soldiers were getting beaten to a pulp on the killing flotilla, the Obama administration morally equivocated and "condemned those acts which resulted in the loss of life."

What the hell does that even mean? And Obama and other world leaders are ignoring the fact that, as was reported by the Israel Project, "all nine protesters killed Monday (May 31) aboard a Gaza-bound Turkish ship carrying weapons-wielding activists are believed to be Turkish nationals and were backed by the IHH, an Islamist Turkish group connected to global jihadi networks."

Has the post-American President Obama bothered to watch the murderous beatings?

It would be pointless to advise the UN, which voted Wednesday on a resolution regarding the killing flotilla, to watch the videos; they are blind with Jew-hatred. There's endless video showing jihadists savagely beating Israelis, but they need a full-on Nazi-style indictment of Israel. I am sure there are Richard Goldstone kapos lined up, just salivating for the chance to bury the Jews.

Where was the full-on investigation of North Korea's torpedoing of a South Korean ship, killing 46 innocent sailors in a declaration of war? Where was the full-on investigation of the Iranian mullahcracy, beating, raping and slaughtering its own people in their march for democracy? Where was the full-on investigation of the UN peacekeepers raping and selling children into human trafficking? Where was the UN investigation when China was found to be harvesting organs from the Falun Gong? Where was the UN investigation of sharia law, stonings, hangings, amputations? Where was the UN investigation of the mindless slaughter of Christians by Muslim hordes wielding machetes in Nigeria? Of Mumbai? London? New York? Madrid? Bali?

Only good gets investigated and condemned at the UN. Evil is exalted, celebrated....

Read it all.

What is Tom Friedman’s deal with the People’s Republic of China? During a recent appearance on Meet the Press, he praised Beijing’s hybrid capitalist-statist-nationalist-communist dictatorship by asking, “What if we could just be China for one day? I mean, just, just, just one day…where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions…on everything from the economy to environment.” He caught himself before drifting too far into his daydream of a PRC-style, command-and-control America, reassuring his fellow panelists, “I don’t want to be China for a second…But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.”

This isn’t the first time Friedman has gushed about the PRC and its orderly, ends-justify-the-means system. During the 2008 Olympics, he offered a paean to the PRC that sounded sadly similar to the commentaries of Western academics, journalists and other elites who used to travel to Moscow and report back about the virtues of Soviet central planning.

“The energy coming out of this country is unrivaled,” Friedman declared as the Beijing Games came to a close. “China did not build the magnificent $43-billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work,” he cheered.

“I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years,” he continued. “China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.”

According to Friedman, “The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train….Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world?”

Well. Where to begin?

Once upon a time, in the late 1990s, when Friedman was the pied piper of globalization, he understood that America’s military might served an essential global purpose and was anything but a drain. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” he observed. “And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe…is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Indeed, America has countless more global responsibilities than the “Middle Kingdom”—fighting al Qaeda and its kindred movements being just one—and is expected to act more responsibly when carrying out those responsibilities than Beijing, which has no qualms about cutting deals with Sudan or Zimbabwe, or propping up the most backward regimes on earth (see North Korea and Burma).

As to all the glitzy glamour and martial order that made Friedman swoon during the 2008 Olympics, Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reminds us that China is not all it appears. Pei notes that “Beijing’s brand of authoritarian politics is spawning a dangerous mix of crony capitalism, rampant corruption and widening inequality.” Pointing to “an incestuous relationship between the state and major industries,” Pei details an eye-opening swirl of troubles:

-“An average of 140,000 party officials and members were caught in corruption scandals each year of the 1990s.” But only 5.6 percent were criminally prosecuted.

-In 2004, 170,850 party apparatchiks were implicated in corruption, and just 2.9 percent were prosecuted.

-The party appoints 81 percent of the CEOs who run China’s state-owned industries.

-In this land of supposed socialist equality, income disparity has increased by 50 percent since the 1970s, “making China one of the most unequal societies in Asia.” In fact, less than one percent of households control more than 60 percent of China’s wealth.

-Government spending has fallen from 36 percent of all healthcare expenditures to less than 15 percent.

None of this should come as a surprise. The PRC doesn’t care about its subjects—only about expanding its power. Recall that Beijing used the Olympics as a pretext for forcibly evicting 1.5 million people from their homes to complete those mass-construction projects that made Friedman’s jaw drop. Due to Beijing’s pre-Olympics preparations, a Center on Housing Rights and Evictions report named “China among the world’s top three housing rights violators.”

Beijing also used the Olympics as an opportunity to stamp out dissent, arrest reporters and block websites. Internet giant Google knows what that’s like. For years, Google officials have been wrestling with Beijing and with their own corporate conscience over what to do about PRC censorship. They recently made the right decision, drawing Beijing’s wrath.

How does China’s ends-justify-the-means regime affect the rest of us? First, and perhaps most worryingly, Beijing is leveraging its external economic power and internal political control to build a military force that can directly challenge the United States. On the strength of its booming economy, China’s military budget was nearly 10 times larger in 2005 than it was in 1989, and roughly doubled between 2005 and 2009, with a 14.9-percent increase last year.

Unchecked by internal dissent or the constraints of conscience, Beijing wants to be the dominant force in its neighborhood and is developing naval, air and space assets to attain that objective. And the U.S. military is standing in the PRC’s way. Hence Beijing’s constant barrage of cyberattacks, maritime incidents and spy probes; unparalleled naval buildup; and menacing missile deployments.

This is just a glimpse of what the PRC’s “national mobilization” can achieve.

Second, China’s central government regularly bullies or murders its weakest subjects: opening fire on peasants protesting land confiscations in Dongzhou, forcibly evicting thousands around Beijing, bulldozing churches in Shaanxi Province, battering nuns who get in the way, raiding “house churches,” cordoning off entire villages to arrest pastors, smothering Tibet.

But Friedman is quick to remind us that Beijing’s benevolent masters give their people “sleek airports” and “magnetic levitation trains.”

Third, China’s state-controlled economy churns out products that endanger innocent lives. The cases are numerous, ranging from contaminated drugs to toxic toothpaste to poisonous baby formula. But the best-known cases involve lead-tainted toys.

Some 20 million toys manufactured in China were recalled in 2007, after it was discovered that they contained unacceptable levels of lead. Just how high is “unacceptable”? The Consumer Product Safety Commission sets the acceptable level of lead at 600 parts per million (ppm), but in 2007 scientists found lead levels between 2,700 ppm and 39,000 ppm in Chinese-made items.

Toys are not the only dangerous import from China. The Associated Press reports that at least 81 deaths and 785 “severe allergic reactions” have been traced to contaminated heparin “made from ingredients imported from China.” It appears that a Chinese plant was cutting corners to save money on the drug, using what The Baltimore Sun calls a “chemical modified to look like heparin’s main ingredient.”

And the list goes on: 53,000 Chinese babies were poisoned by formula tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics production. Back here in the States, 450,000 tires made in China were recalled because their treads were separating at highway speeds.

Because of the “incestuous relationship between the state and major industries” described by Pei, Beijing cannot claim innocence or feign ignorance. Indeed, this is a government with the power and wherewithal to “authorize the right solutions,” according to Friedman.

Fourth, China’s autocratic regime—the one Friedman wants to emulate “just for a day”—depends on a slave-labor system known as laogai to churn out all those cheap and dangerous exports. An estimated 4-6 million people are rotting away in the laogai prison camps, serving out varying years and degrees of penance to the state Mao erected. Laogai prisoners produce everything from bottled water and tea to electronics and toys. The Laogai Research Foundation identified 1,100 laogai camps in its 2006 report.

This is the natural endpoint of what Freidman calls “concentrated state power,” without all those irritating checks and balances that protect individual freedom.

Speaking of checks and balances, a decade ago Friedman actually argued that “it’s Madison, not Mao, who’s winning the day” in China. That’s Madison as in James Madison, author of our constitution. Madison’s system of checks and balances was designed not to empower the state, but to protect the individual from the state, to check the whims of those in power, to ensure that the government’s means and ends are justified.

It may be slow or “suboptimal,” but it’s superior to Beijing’s way.

Alan W. Dowd writes on defense and security issues.

[This article is reprinted from the National Observer.]

One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.

Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78 (1981) and Anti-Americanism (1995).

Here, in his recent book United in Hate, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.

Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.

They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.

Read the rest at FPM

The National Security Strategy (NSS) released by the Barack Obama administration on May 27 is not so much a look forward as a look back. It is an attempt to return to the optimistic days following the end of the Cold War when it seemed a peaceful new world order was possible. In 1999, President Bill Clinton claimed “perhaps for the first time in history, the world’s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory. The world clearly is coming together.” President Obama says essentially the same thing in the opening paragraph of his cover letter to the NSS when he notes that “globalization”—the buzz word of the post-Cold War era — has “made peace possible among the major powers.” The dangers that remain are of a different sort, “from international terrorism and the spread of deadly technologies, to economic upheaval and a changing climate.”

That the world looked like the classical liberal model expounded by Clinton in 1999 was doubtful even then. A decade later, the cracks are even larger. Five months before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, a Chinese fighter rammed a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea, an area Beijing has been trying to claim as sovereign territory. The rise of China and the emergence of other ambitious powers herald not a new world but a new cycle in the old world of international rivalry. The NSS explicitly rejects the “world as it is” in its attempt to fashion “the world we seek.” But the NSS does not lay out a path between worlds; it simply assumes the new world already exists.

There are still a few odds and ends to be cleaned up from the Bush administration, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSS pledges “a focus on defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe” but sees no real dangers after that which would require a military effort. Though the NSS identifies the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and biological) as problems, the two most menacing rogue states, North Korea and Iran, are to be dealt with through diplomacy. As the NSS states on page 23, “If North Korea eliminates its nuclear weapons program, and Iran meets its international obligations on its nuclear program, they will be able to proceed on a path to greater political and economic integration with the international community. If they ignore their international obligations, we will pursue multiple means to increase their isolation and bring them into compliance with international nonproliferation norms.” This is at best a containment policy.

But how can Pyongyang or Tehran be contained, let alone “isolated” when they have friends among the other major powers? The NSS depends on there being a consensus among the powers on issues like non-proliferation within a general spirit of cooperation. That is not how world politics is evolving.

According to the NSS, “The European Union has deepened its integration. Russia has reemerged in the international arena as a strong voice. China and India—the world’s two most populous nations—are becoming more engaged globally. From Latin America to Africa to the Pacific, new and emerging powers hold out opportunities for partnership, even as a handful of states endanger regional and global security by flouting international norms.” Under the Obama policy, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia—so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.”

The integration of the EU is being called into question by the sovereign debt crisis that has ripped through Greece and has threatened to spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. The single euro currency, once thought to be an alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, is in free fall. Euro skeptics in England, France, Holland and Germany are balking at “saving” the Mediterranean and Eastern members of the bloc.

The NSS singles out Brazil for special praise saying, “We welcome Brazil’s leadership and seek to move beyond dated North-South divisions to pursue progress on bilateral, hemispheric, and global issues.” Yet, Brazil just brokered a deal with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program meant to shield it from a new round of UN sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had told President Obama personally at the Nuclear Security Summit that he would not back additional sanctions on Iran, and repeated this stance when meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Brasilia immediately after the two leaders left Washington. The Hu-Lula meeting took place within the larger context of a BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) summit where the emerging powers coordinate policies formulated primarily against the positions of the United States and EU.

South Africa joins the mix in BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), a coalition at the UN that opposes the American and European demand for mandated limits on green house gas emissions to fight alleged global warming. Supported by Russia and the group of 77 developing nations, BASIC represents the world’s rejection of President Obama’s obsession about climate change that appears repeatedly in the NSS as a priority global threat.

The core value of BASIC and its allies is unrestricted economic growth, which means intensified competition in domestic and world markets. For some time, American officials have made it clear that unless China, India and Brazil provide substantial market access to U.S. exports commensurate with their high economic growth rates, there can be no conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks. These negotiations have been stalled virtually from their inception in 2001 due to a fundamental clash of national interests.

The Obama administration has hailed China and Russia for supporting a draft sanctions proposal against Iran at the UN. Yet, Beijing and Moscow watered down the resolution to prevent it from crippling the Tehran regime. Most importantly, Russia and China will be allowed to continue investing in Iran’s energy sector, which will boost the country’s revenues which the mullah’s use to finance their aggressive foreign policy as well as nuclear development. To improve relations, the Obama administration dropped sanctions against Moscow’s state arms export agency and three Russian entities previously found to have transferred technology or weapons to Iran. The UN sanctions proposal would also allow the Russians to sell S-300 air defense missiles (which have an anti-missile capability) to Tehran. So even if the UN Security Council adopts the resolution, it will not “isolate” Iran from its main international backers.

Nor is international rivalry confined to economics and rogue states. China’s massive military modernization program, led by new weapon systems designed to attack U.S. and allied forces across Asia, is not mentioned in the NSS. To do so would have undermined the fanciful vision of a peaceful, cooperative world. It would also have called into question why the Obama Pentagon is cutting back on the high-end conventional forces, from armored units and air superiority fighters to missile defense and naval shipbuilding, that would be needed to not only counter rising “peer” competitors like China but to defeat major regional powers like North Korea and Iran.

The NSS attempts to conjure up a world in which an NSS is not needed, but the Obama administration does not have the power to change the true, dangerous nature of global politics. What the NSS reveals is the unwillingness of President Obama to deal with the world as it is. Thus, America will remain vulnerable, as its leaders are continually blindsided by the strategies of adversaries they cannot bring themselves to think about.

[This article is reprinted from the National Observer.]

One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.

Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78 (1981) and Anti-Americanism (1995).

Here, in his recent book United in Hate, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.

Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.

They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.

Back in the Soviet Union they had risked their lives to campaign for the millions who were being tortured and killed in the Gulag slave labour camps and psychiatric hospitals simply because of their political and religious beliefs. Yet in America they were being viciously attacked by an intelligentsia that loathed America while idolising communist barbarism.

It was a shock the young Glazov never really recovered from, and here he seeks to assess and understand this most bizarre feature of Western life. And with the onset of militant Islam, he sees the whole scenario again being played out before his eyes.

The first half of this important book covers the earlier cases of Western fascination with, and blindness to, totalitarian nightmare states. The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China were all objects of wide-eyed leftist veneration and adoration.

Glazov reminds us of the words of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, uttered during the height of Stalin’s murder of millions. He waxed eloquent in his love of Stalin with these words: Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”

French writer Jean-Paul Sartre could say this about another murderous thug, Fidel Castro: “Castro is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle and the earth. He is the whole island.” And Father Daniel Berrigan, another longstanding apologist for tyrants, could say this of Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong: he is an individual “in whom complexity dwells: … a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion …”

Or consider the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who after capturing power in 1979 managed to carry out 8,000 political executions in the following three years. They made the nation a place of torture, repression and dictatorship. Yet plenty of Western leftists fell at their feet in worship.

German writer Günter Grass, who was shown a “prison” which the Sandinistas wanted political pilgrims to see — not the actual prisons where inmates were beaten, starved, tortured and killed — came back with euphoric exhilaration: “The humane way in which sentences are carried out!”, he gushed, along with other sentimental mush.

Of course, the Soviets had done just the same with the Gulag decades earlier, to fool gullible Westerners who came over for a look. Western left-wingers were just as ignorant and easily deceived in the 1930s or ’50s as they were in the ’80s.

And they still are. The second half of this book looks at Islamic terrorism, and its Western apologists. There are plenty of leftists in the West who are convinced that Islamic terrorism either does not exist, or is all America’s fault.

Again, Glazov offers plenty of examples. The September 11 atrocity provides plenty of quotes. Norman Mailer called the suicide-hijackers “brilliant.” He excused the attack by saying, “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Susan Sontag assured us that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” Film-maker Oliver Stone affirmed that 9/11 was a “revolt” and said the ensuing Palestinian celebrations were comparable to those seen in the French and Russian revolutions.

Christian leader Tony Campolo could argue that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the medieval Crusades. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.” On and on the apologists for terror and tyranny go. And then there is the inherent anti-Semitism in so much of this as well.

For many left-wingers, Israel is always the enemy, and the Muslim and Arab populations can do no wrong. Consider the remarks of Mike Wallace concerning Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the annihilation of Israel: “He’s an impressive fellow this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell. … You’ll find him an interesting man.”

These leftists offered more support for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than they did for George W. Bush. Film-maker Michael Moore denounced the US while extolling the terrorists: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”

Glazov devotes a chapter to seeking to examine the psychological makeup of these leftists whose romance with tyranny and terror seems so hard to fathom. They are alienated from their own homelands, although seldom realise it. They espouse a secular religion, a secular utopian vision which speaks much of humanity but is happy to see individual humans crushed in the attempt to create their coercive utopia.

The West-hating Left seems to be a permanent feature of modern Western life. Now that the communist revolution has lost its momentum, other causes must be found. The Islamist cause nicely does the trick. The same enemies are there, such as America, freedom and affluence.

As this book reminds us, we really have two enemies to contend with: murderous totalitarian ideologies of every stripe, and their Western leftist support base. It is an insidious alliance of which we all must be aware. This book does a fine job of making that very clear indeed.

Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website, CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com.

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