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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; China</title>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: We&#8217;re Number Two</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-were-number-two/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-were-number-two</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-were-number-two/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:09:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bill whittle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Firewall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247932</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><strong>Recently, China overtook the United States as the largest Economy in the World &#8212; at least when measured by the PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) metric. In Bill Whittle&#8217;s latest Firewall, he shows why this is not just a crying shame &#8212; it&#8217;s a crime &#8212; and he tells us what we can do about it. See the video and transcript below.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1EkVU-1HBDQ" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p>Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>A few days ago, we rather quietly passed a milestone – a big one. For the first time since the 1870’s – that would be during the administration of President Ulysses S Grant – The United States is no longer the worlds largest economy.<br />
“Hold on to your hats, America,” reports Brett Arends of MarketWatch in his online article, “And throw away that big fat Styrofoam finger while you’re at it.”<br />
Now I don’t know anything about Brett Arends politics, but throwing away that big fat Styrofoam finger – the red, white and blue one that says “we’re number one!” is a long held-wish of the progressive left. It’s so gauche, so unspeakably vulgar, this Phillistine business of having pride in yourself.</p>
<p>This news about us taking second place, economically, to China is not a bug for the left – it’s a feature. They hate this country. Collectivists – like our President, let’s say &#8212; have always hated capitalism, always hated individuality, always hated the idea that more work leads to more rewards… in other words, always hated everything that America has stood for.</p>
<p>Just before he was elected, Barack Obama famously bragged that he and the progressive movement would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Is that something you would want to do to something or someone you loved – fundamentally transform it? Would the first promise you made to a new bride you claimed to adore be that you could not wait to fundamentally transform her? Progressives are happy we’ve fallen to second. It reduces global inequality.They’ll be happier yet when we’ve fallen to third, or tenth, or twentieth – the way our education system did when they got their hands on it.</p>
<p>Now China, needless to say, has a little more than four times the population of the United States. Surely we should be satisfied with that, right? That one-quarter of China’s population – America – produces just slightly less than they do?<br />
No, dammit, we should not be satisfied. First place is not a statistic. First place is an attitude. First place is an identity. First place is destiny, and the instant you become willing to come in second at anything you will find second place is a sliding slope to nowhere. not where you will remain.</p>
<p>That China is growing at an incredible pace is self-evident. A lot of that is not something we can do anything about – but a lot of it is something we can do something about, but won’t. A significant portion of China’s tech industry is – how should I put this delicately – STOLEN from western research and development. We don’t retaliate because we can’t add; our deficit spending makes us their slaves.<br />
And another significant portion – everything from pirated movie disks to “Adidos” running shoes to “Boreos” cookies to “Arm and Hatchet” baking soda are just flagrant theft worth trillions. But put all that aside. That’s just bitching about a bad call. Or two. Or three. Million.</p>
<p>The reason China has surpassed the US economy is pretty simple, really. The Socialist Chinese leadership has kept the dictatorial essence of socialism while allowing the Chinese people to embrace a capitalist ethic of hard work and reward for effort. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean the American Progressives are trying, and succeeding, in foisting laziness, envy, irresponsibility, government dependency and sloth – in other words, socialism &#8212; on the American people.</p>
<p>Record numbers of Americans are on food stamps, unemployment, and other forms of taxpayer support – in other words government forced redistribution of income, at the cost of long-term growth and prosperity. But it’s much worse than that.<br />
The Progressive left has throttled what might have been the most booming economic recovery in American history through irresponsible fiscal policy, higher taxes, and absurd regulations – mostly regulations advocated by environmental hysterics. And none of them make the slightest lick of sense: While doing everything he can to prevent America from cleanly burning the plentiful, inexpensive fossil fuels right beneath our feet, he then sells coal and oil to China – where it’s burned, and not very cleanly, in the same atmosphere we inhabit.</p>
<p>World dominant militaries depend on world dominant economies. World dominant research and innovation depends on the incentive of financial reward and freedom from ridiculous levels of regulation. When guys like Steve Jobs, the founder of the most cash-rich company in the world, says he could never start Apple in America today, that’s not because we’ve run out of garages, or capital, or people willing to risk that capital. Virtually all of the great ideas still come from right here. But the Progressive left, which is significantly too stupid and infinitely to lazy to go out and make their own wealth, taxes and regulates new start-ups to death to feed a government that costs about four thousand billion dollars a year… then you know these shackles are self-imposed, and what we could do if we would just release ourselves from these self-imposed chains would not just astonish the Chinese and the rest of the world – it would astonish us ourselves.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</div>
<h1 id="page-title" class="page__title title"><em> </em></h1>
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		<item>
		<title>Finding Americans to do Beijing&#8217;s Dirty Work</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-r-hawkins/finding-americans-to-do-beijings-dirty-work-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=finding-americans-to-do-beijings-dirty-work-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-r-hawkins/finding-americans-to-do-beijings-dirty-work-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:26:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William R. Hawkins]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hawkins]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prof. Kiracofe]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245668</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Chinese communists recruit the usual suspects who believe the U.S. is run by fascists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/clifford_kirakofe.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245553" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/clifford_kirakofe.jpg" alt="clifford_kirakofe" width="235" height="252" /></a>President Barack Obama and the mainstream media have hailed the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Beijing as demonstrating U.S. and Chinese cooperation on trade, climate change and regional issues. Chinese sources, however, have focused more on Beijing&#8217;s diplomatic gains in competition with America. <em>Global Times</em>, a publication of the ruling Chinese Communist Party noted for its nationalist rhetoric has taken the lead. But as it likes to do, it has found an American voice to make its case; Clifford A. Kiracofe, Jr. a former staffer for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1987-1992) and then an adjunct professor of history and political science at the Virginia Military Institute.</p>
<p>In an <a href="http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/892215.shtml">op-ed</a> entitled &#8220;Beijing APEC rebuffs US hegemonism&#8221; Kiracofe claimed,</p>
<blockquote><p>The salient features of the meeting are embodied in innovative [Chinese] concepts such as the creation of an inclusive free trade zone, the commitment to connectivity, new <a href="http://www.globaltimes.cn/special-coverage/ReportsfromtheSilkRoad/index.html">Silk Road</a>s, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).</p>
<p>Washington&#8217;s vision for the Asia-Pacific region, on the other hand, has been the creation of an exclusive anti-China Trans-Pacific Partnership coupled with hard and soft-power containment of China. This counterproductive vision just hit a dead end in Beijing.</p></blockquote>
<p>It is clear that Beijing&#8217;s proposals were all aimed at competing with U.S.-led institutions, in particular the AIIB which will put Chinese capital to work to spread its influence and control over supply chains and export markets. What sent shock waves across the region was President Xi Jinping&#8217;s speech November 9 calling for an &#8220;Asia-Pacific Dream&#8221; which echoed his theme of a &#8220;China Dream.&#8221; The implication is that Beijing wants to incorporate the entire region within its own imperial vision of the future. The Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan all have reason to fear the expanding threats posed by Chinese forces operating off their coasts in disputed waters. Beijing&#8217;s claims it owns the entire South and East China seas, based on maps from the ancient Chinese Empire. And China&#8217;s support for North Korea keeps South Korea on edge as well.</p>
<p>After APEC, the G20 met in Brisbane, Australia. On the sidelines of that summit, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Obama renewed their alliance commitments, which include providing a security umbrella for the smaller nations along the Pacific Rim. Beijing has not broken these bonds.</p>
<p>The issue isn&#8217;t whether there is a rivalry between the United States and China for influence in Asia (and globally as well). The issue is that Kiracofe sides with Beijing in this contest against his own country. But this should not be surprising given his past statements about America which should also raise eyebrows. He, of course, thinks the Vietnam War was &#8220;unjust&#8221; and<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hROU5sJUyG4"> relishes</a> his &#8220;militant&#8221; days in the 1960&#8242;s anti-war movement. After all, the U.S. was trying to defeat the expansion of communism. He also calls for coming to terms with Iran and has a warped version of how the Cold War ended. To Kiracofe,</p>
<blockquote><p>The Cold War ended through diplomatic negotiations undertaken by the US and the Soviet Union. Then US president Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit. It was a win-win and not a zero-sum conclusion to a dangerous tension-filled period in international relations.</p></blockquote>
<p>There is no mention of how the Soviet Union collapsed and disintegrated, the outcome President Reagan had been working towards since taking office. Reagan certainly had no respect for the communist regime. That moral failing falls to people like Kiracofe. Anyone who wants to know how negotiations pushed the USSR over the edge and brought victory to the U.S. should read Ken Adelman&#8217;s recent book <em>Reagan at Reykjavik</em><em>: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War. </em></p>
<p>Professor Kiracofe has often referred to the US political elite as an &#8220;imperial faction&#8221; and US policy as &#8220;imperialism.&#8221; Yet, even these terms are mild compared to his thoughts about America expressed in a <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3327kiracoff_berlin.html">lecture</a> given in Germany at a conference organized by the radical <em>Executive Intelligence Review</em> on July 7, 2006. Kiracofe argued at length that &#8220;in today&#8217;s political situation in the United States we are, in effect, confronting the same forces that attempted to impose fascism in the United States during the 1930s.&#8221; The EIR is published by the notorious conspiracy theorist and cult figure Lyndon LaRouche, and Kiracofe has participated in several of its events. In Germany, Kiracofe argued,</p>
<blockquote><p>Radical Right ideology is promoted through the organized intellectual activity funded by a small group of private foundations backing a so-called &#8220;conservative&#8221; and &#8220;neo-conservative&#8221; ideology that is, in fact, similar to the European Fascist ideology of the 1920s and 1930s. These foundations include: the Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundations, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Olin Foundation. Associated &#8220;think tanks&#8221; would include the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, both of Washington, D.C</p>
<p>Key features of the contemporary &#8220;New Right&#8221; and &#8220;neo-conservative&#8221; ideology in the United States are drawn from three main European sources: Italian nationalism and Fascism, French Integralism, and German National Socialism.</p></blockquote>
<p>He devoted a large part of his lecture to what he believes was a fascist conspiracy&#8211; which he defines in standard Marxist terms as tied to &#8220;finance capitalism&#8221;&#8211; to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt under the banner of the American Liberty League. He then claims there was a continuation of this fascist plot after World War II which runs to the present. &#8220;For example, during the Truman Administration, Dean Acheson (1893-1971), an influential Washington, D.C. attorney, became Secretary of State under President Truman. Acheson had been a member of the American Liberty League,&#8221; Kiracofe then goes on to assert,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Is it any coincidence today that Condi Rice praises Acheson and President Bush praises Truman? Certainly not. We can recall the close business connection between the Bush family and pro-Nazi financial and industrial circles in Germany, particularly the Thyssen interests.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>No wonder Prof. Kiracofe has left this lecture off his official VMI curriculum vitae! Such views could prove embarrassing to VMI administrators and alumni. It is, however, important to know what kind of people the Chinese Communist regime can find in America to do their dirty work for them. And speaking of fascism, does Lord Haw Haw come to mind when reading Kiracofe&#8217;s propaganda against the U.S.?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>China Tests Stealth Plane it Stole from US During Obama Visit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/china-tests-stealth-plane-it-stole-from-us-during-obama-visit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=china-tests-stealth-plane-it-stole-from-us-during-obama-visit</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/china-tests-stealth-plane-it-stole-from-us-during-obama-visit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2014 14:15:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[barack hussein obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245154</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[China keeps making Obama bow]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/6a00d8341c60bf53ef0133eca5baaf970b-600wi.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-245156" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/6a00d8341c60bf53ef0133eca5baaf970b-600wi.jpg" alt="6a00d8341c60bf53ef0133eca5baaf970b-600wi" width="400" height="309" /></a></p>
<p>But don&#8217;t worry, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-global-warming-deal-wchina-isnt-actually-binding-on-china/">there&#8217;s still that completely worthwhile </a>&#8220;Climate Change Pact&#8221; which obligates China to absolutely nothing. Meanwhile <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/12/china-flight-tests-new-stealth-jet-during-obama-visit/?intcmp=trending">China keeps making Obama bow</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Demonstration flights by the new J-31 fighter jet &#8212; China&#8217;s second new radar-evading warplane &#8212; were a key feature at a major arms show in Zhuhai, located near Macau, on Monday.</p>
<p>The J-31 flights coincided with President Obama&#8217;s visit to Beijing for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting. In a speech and meetings with Chinese leaders, Obama called on China to curtail cyber theft of trade secrets.</p>
<p>China obtained secrets from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter through cyber attacks against a subcontractor for Lockheed Martin. The technology has shown up in China&#8217;s first stealth jet, the J-20, and in the J-31. Both of the jets&#8217; design features and equipment are similar to those of the F-35.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in Beijing Tuesday that Obama would press China&#8217;s leader Xi Jinping to curb Chinese cyber espionage.</p></blockquote>
<p>And China responded by rubbing Obama&#8217;s face in it. Because that&#8217;s what tyrannies do to weak foreigners who come whining to them and asking them to play nice.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>President Obama: Where Are Your Manners?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/president-obama-where-are-your-manners/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=president-obama-where-are-your-manners</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/president-obama-where-are-your-manners/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:10:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gum]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pr]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245265</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A PR disaster in China. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2135_1415715416.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245268" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2135_1415715416-374x350.jpg" alt="2135_1415715416" width="262" height="245" /></a>President Barack Obama has continually made terrible decisions – domestically and internationally – and has left America in a worse place than when he started.  In China, Obama chewed gum and outraged Chinese citizens with his behavior.  This has been a constant throughout his administration.  Some meaningful quotes on the absolute failures of Obama when it has come to diplomacy:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“As far as is known, Obama became the first President, the first Commander-in-Chief, not to salute the living recipient of the Medal of Honor after presenting the medal.” &#8212; Rees Lloyd</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Obama is inexperienced and lacks a proper understanding of how he should handle himself as President.” &#8212; Casey Carmical</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Who can forget the moment last year when Obama took a selfie during a memorial service for anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela?” &#8212; Amie Parnes</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“However one feels politically, it is questionable to salute Marines while holding a coffee cup – Could not someone have held it for him?” &#8212; Eric Vainer </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">The GOP is taking the public outrage over Obama&#8217;s salute to Marines while holding a coffee cup and running with it.” &#8212; Lisa Fine</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“In an unprecedented breach of diplomatic etiquette, President Obama once again sandbagged Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.” &#8212; Isi Leibler</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;"> “President Obama was the most liberal and most incompetent president in my lifetime ever since Jimmy Carter.” &#8212; Bobby Jindal</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“It was seen as a slap in the face when Obama got out of his U.S. supplied transportation chewing gum.” &#8212; Roz Zurko</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“To see a leader like Bibi Netanyahu treated so shabbily by someone [Obama] who treats us the same way was too much to bear.” &#8212; William A. Jacobson</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Obama&#8217;s awkward encounter with Akihito – bows are not meant to accompany physical contact – is not the first time the president has been criticized for his greeting of a foreign leader: Critics accused him of genuflecting to Saudi King Abdullah at a world economic summit this year.” &#8212; Foster Klug</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;"> “Yes, President Obama has just gifted the queen an iPod.” &#8212; Chris Matyszczyk</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Obama presented former Prime Minister Gordon Brown with DVDs of American films that couldn&#8217;t be played on British machines. Our classy president gave the queen an iPod loaded with his speeches.” &#8212; Robert Hanusa</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Instead of rendering the traditional salute, after fumbling as if all-thumbs in trying to affix the blue-ribboned Medal of Honor, Obama, equally awkwardly, tried to &#8216;hug&#8217; the Sergeant. Yes, a &#8216;hug&#8217; for the soldier who remained at attention with eyes front in military bearing.” &#8212; Rees Lloyd</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Mr. Obama’s manners at the event were on a par with those of Clark Griswold&#8217;s cousin Eddie from the 1989 movie Christmas Vacation.” &#8212; Larry Clifton</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;"> “Barack Obama makes us look patronizing, rude, and condescending.” &#8212; Doug Wead</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Gordon Brown has been snubbed repeatedly by Barack Obama during his trip to the United States, as the fall-out from the release of the Lockerbie bomber appeared to have left &#8216;the special relationship&#8217; at its lowest ebb for nearly 20 years.” &#8212; Andrew Porter</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“What is also more consistent with the Limbaugh and D’Souza thesis are such personal quirks as Obama’s gross rudeness to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House and his otherwise inexplicable public debasement of himself and the United States by bowing low to other foreign leaders.” &#8212; Thomas Sowell</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“One of the important considerations for the leader of the free world has to be inter-personnel relations.” &#8212; Jonah Engler </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“We made this meeting so luxurious, with singing and dancing, but see Obama, stepping out of his car chewing gum like an idler.” &#8212; Yin Hong</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“He [Obama] made the mistake of both shaking hands and bowing at the same time, a big breach of etiquette. The truth was that he was supposed to choose one or the other.” &#8212; David E. Sanger</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“President Obama has very poor personal relations with most world leaders.” &#8212; Ed Lasky</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“But the quintessential dissing of our mother country had to be Obama&#8217;s return of a bust of Winston Churchill bestowed on the U.S. by former Prime Minister Tony Blair after 9/11.” &#8212; Robert Hanusa</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #232323;">“Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family.” &#8212; Adrian Blomfield</span></li>
</ul>
<p style="color: #232323;">This <a href="http://www.5wpr.com">NY PR firm owner</a> has said it before and shall say it again – Obama’s legacy is one of <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/obamas-legacy-of-disaster/">disaster</a>.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Visa-For-Sale Scheme and Other Useless Immigration Programs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/americas-visa-for-sale-scheme-and-other-useless-immigration-programs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=americas-visa-for-sale-scheme-and-other-useless-immigration-programs</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/americas-visa-for-sale-scheme-and-other-useless-immigration-programs/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2014 04:10:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[investor immigrant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[skill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[visa]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241489</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The immigration system's indifference to immigrant skills and U.S. labor demands. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-22-at-1.20.34-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241490" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-22-at-1.20.34-AM-420x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 1.20.34 AM" width="338" height="282" /></a>For the <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/investor-visas-soaked-up-by-chinese-1409095982">first time</a> </span>since its creation in 1990, the &#8220;investor immigrant&#8221; visa program looks on track to have its annual 10,000 allotment fully used up this year. This milestone for the program is due to the increasing number of wealthy applicants from mainland China, a country that now boasts almost <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://time.com/2852740/china-millionaires/">2.5 million</a> </span>millionaires. The “EB-5 visa”, which gives expedited citizenship to applicants who invest $500,000 in a jobs-generating business for 2 years, is not only confusing and poorly designed but it’s been rife with <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/07/24/immigration-eb-5-visa-for-sale/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">investor fraud</span></a> since it started. Nevertheless, because of the access a green card provides to well-known <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://visaeb-5.com/chinese-immigrants-come-to-us-for-better-education/">US schools</a> </span>(EB-5 applicants can also bring in their families), uptake from China really has been brisk. Over 80 percent of applicants are now sourced from that country, which remarkably has transitioned the Chinese from “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/744475.stm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">boat people</span></a>” to “yacht people” in less than one generation.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But why have such a visa-for-sale program? Former labor economics professor at Cornell <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://cis.org/Videos/ImmigrationPolicyInterviews/Vernon-Briggs-Cornell-University">Vernon Briggs</a> </span>says the entire concept of the “investor immigrants” category “introduces the principle that the rich of the world can buy their way into the United States” and “should be viewed as a source of shame.” The businesses financed by the program, which are promoted to applicants by fee-taking middlemen, also usually turn to <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-15/opinions/38556678_1_terry-mcauliffe-jobs-greentech-automotive"><span style="color: #0433ff;">junk</span></a>– after all, if your business plan is good, why not just get a bank loan? According to <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-15/opinions/38556678_1_terry-mcauliffe-jobs-greentech-automotive"><span style="color: #0433ff;">critics</span></a>, the only real beneficiaries are immigration lawyers and consultants, whose reps at the <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/the-american-bar-associations-amnesty-hypocrisy/">American Bar Association</a> </span>and the American Immigration Lawyers Association spend tens of millions each year lobbying for more advantageous regulations under this and other visa programs.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Although EB-5 applicants aren’t likely to become a public charge and the allotment’s small compared to the 1.5 million (legal) immigrants allowed into the country annually, the program typifies what’s inherently wrong with much of our immigration system today. Most of the allocation of visas under the present system fails to take into account the applicant’s actual skills and human capital. That they&#8217;re skill-less doesn&#8217;t matter. Further, the green card system generally fails to consider the economic conditions present in the country at the time of application – for instance, by adjusting caps downward when the country’s in recession. Such considerations should be first and foremost in any rational immigration program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Take the “diversity lottery visa” as a larger example. The point of the <a href="https://www.numbersusa.com/solutions/eliminate-visa-lottery"><span style="color: #0433ff;">diversity lottery</span></a>, which applies mainly to <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DV-2015-Instructions-Translations/DV_2015_Instructions.pdf">Africa</a> </span>and South Asia, is simply to bring in applicants of a particular race, as opposed to actual labor market-need. Because of this low standard, over 10 million people apply for the 55,000 slots made available each year. Ironically, because of its emphasis on race and national origin, the diversity visa harkens back to the pre-1965 national quotas system, which was criticized during the civil rights-era for technically being non-race-neutral – The national quotas system was started in 1924 to keep immigration low and to ensure assimilation; it had a built-in preference for America’s settler-stock and for immigrants from countries that made up the first immigration wave of 1860-1890.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But neither EB-5 nor the diversity lottery compare in size to the equally questionable family reunification system (aka “<a href="https://www.numbersusa.com/solutions/end-chain-migration"><span style="color: #0433ff;">chain migration</span></a>”). As part of the late-Senator Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act, the program provides green cards to immediate family members and gives preferences to married adult children as well as brothers and sisters of US citizens – Apparently, Congress thought it proper to base a visa system on the idea that because one brother in a foreign country might really miss his brother in America, the two had a right to be reunited – Because of its wide application, the family reunification system consistently accounts for over <i>half</i> the 1.5 million immigrants the country takes in annually.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Combined, these programs form the basis of our immigration system today, however, each of them fail to consider the actual skills and abilities of the applicant nor are their allotments adjusted according to economic conditions. Despite immigration policy being essentially a labor policy, over the last several decades the country’s immigration system has more or less been functioning independent from the domestic economy and our employment situation (which at the moment, is appalling). Failing to take these considerations into account makes our current immigration system profoundly irrational and irrational policy always leads to disastrous consequences.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Chinese Jihadist Ilham Tohti is not a Political Dissident</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/chinese-jihadist-ilham-tohti/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=chinese-jihadist-ilham-tohti</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/chinese-jihadist-ilham-tohti/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 12 Jul 2014 13:42:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ilham Tohti]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim uighurs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235772</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[By arresting Ilham Tohti, China is stating that it won't negotiate with Muslim terrorists]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Ilham-Tohti.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-235773" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Ilham-Tohti-450x315.jpg" alt="Ilham Tohti" width="450" height="315" /></a></p>
<p>Amnesty International, PEN and a number of other leftist groups have been begun campaigns in defense of Ilham Tohti and his students, a Muslim activist they describe as a &#8220;moderate scholar&#8221;.</p>
<p>Obama Inc&#8217;s Jen Psaki, who can&#8217;t be bothered to speak about genuine political dissidents detained in the Muslim world, rushed out to demand that, &#8220;Chinese authorities to immediately account for the whereabouts of Mr. Tohti and his students and guarantee Mr. Tohti and his students the protections and freedoms to which they are entitled under China’s international human rights commitments, including the freedom of expression.&#8221;</p>
<p>Good luck with that.</p>
<p>They claim that he is suffering without food. In reality he chose not to eat because prison authorities wouldn&#8217;t provide him with an Islamic diet.</p>
<p>Most of all they rapidly gloss over why he was arrested describing him as a supporter of separatism.</p>
<p>Ilham Tohti was detained after brutal Uighur Islamist terrorist attacks. Even his public statements repeatedly made excuses for Islamic terrorism and played the old blackmail game.</p>
<blockquote><p>After the Tienanmen Square he said that, &#8220;The best thing would be for the authorities to take a step back and examine what drives people to such desperation in the first place.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Every time something happens, the government responds with one word: pressure. High pressure, high pressure, and even greater pressure. This leads to greater resistance and more conflict,&#8221; Tohti said by phone. &#8220;The government should reflect and take responsibility for what is happening in Xinjiang now and in the future.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;The government should know that in Xinjiang there is a peaceful resistance to violence, as well as a violent struggle against violence. Some of it has nothing to do with terrorism or separatism,&#8221; Tohti said.</p>
<p>&#8220;A lot of people just cannot go on this way. They can&#8217;t turn to legal channels or the media; they have no way to protect their own rights or express themselves. What are they supposed to do? Some of them choose confrontation and agitation,&#8221; he said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Most of us recognize such rhetoric as typical of the political arm of terrorist groups. CAIR, for example, commonly traffics in it in the US.</p>
<p>The premise is if you don&#8217;t strike a deal with us, you&#8217;ll have to deal with the terrorists, when they are actually one and the same.</p>
<p>The United States has freedom of speech. China doesn&#8217;t. And it has much less tolerance for terrorism. By arresting Ilham Tohti they are sending a message that they won&#8217;t be playing a game of Good Jihadist, Bad Jihadist.</p>
<p>By arresting Ilham Tohti, China is stating that it won&#8217;t negotiate with Muslim terrorists, the real ones or their &#8220;moderate&#8221; front men.</p>
<p>Ilham Tohti played the political arm of the Jihad, threatening the authorities with more terrorism unless they met their demands. That&#8217;s what these quotes amount to. Liberals can&#8217;t be expected to see it because they&#8217;ve long since become numbed to the implications of their own rhetoric.</p>
<p>China chose to crack down more instead of negotiate. Considering where negotiating with Islamic terrorists has gotten us, who is to say that they&#8217;re wrong.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Marine Preserve Cripples US Navy Defense Against China</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-marine-preserve-cripples-us-navy-defense-against-china/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-marine-preserve-cripples-us-navy-defense-against-china</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-marine-preserve-cripples-us-navy-defense-against-china/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 22 Jun 2014 15:44:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hawaii]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Navy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234564</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Pacific monument lies across the most direct paths from the East China Sea to the Central Pacific]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/capt.52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a-52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a-0.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-234565" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/capt.52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a-52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a-0.jpg" alt="capt.52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a-52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a-0" width="400" height="236" /></a></p>
<p>Last week<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/al-qaeda-hits-baghdad-obama-hits-the-beach/"> I wrote about how Obama</a> and <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/john-kerry-discusses-whether-iraq-is-aware-of-global-warming/">Kerry&#8217;s ridiculous ocean obsession</a> was distracting from important national security issues such as Al Qaeda overrunning Iraq.</p>
<p>But as former Naval Intelligence officer and national security expert J.E. Dyer points out, <a href="http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/06/21/obamas-marine-protected-area-expansion-collision-course-national-security/">the 782,000 mile marine preserve can also undermine</a> national security.</p>
<blockquote><p>Environmentalist groups have been fighting the U.S. Navy for years over the use of low-frequency and mid-range sonars&#8230;</p>
<p>&#8230;The expanded monument area takes the sonar fight, which has been mostly contained in smaller areas near the coast, and writes it over a huge swath of ocean.</p>
<p>The expanded Pacific Islands monument is entirely a forward operational area.  It’s not a training area from which the Navy might perhaps relocate to satisfy other stakeholders.  It’s a very large part of the ocean which we would be deciding to close off to certain kinds of operations – if we followed the monument expansion to its predictable conclusion, and allowed the logic of environmental activism to override the needs of the Navy.</p>
<p>This brings us to the third dimension of the problem, which is that the expanded Pacific Islands monument is an especially bad place to limit or curtail our naval operations.  The reason is that it is the most obvious pathway for Chinese naval units, including submarines, into the Central and Eastern Pacific&#8230;</p>
<p>The gradual expansion of China’s naval operating areas, including expansion into the Pacific, has been a key trend in the Chinese fleet’s profile.  Coupled with it in recent years have been deployments by intelligence collection ships (AGIs) to patrols off of Guam and Hawaii.</p>
<p>These patrols are intended straightforwardly for collection against U.S. military activities, of course, but in light of China’s expanding naval profile, they are also a harbinger of future fleet operations in the Pacific.</p>
<p>Of particular significance, especially as it concerns the use of sonar, is the likelihood of Chinese submarine operations becoming routine in the Pacific&#8230;</p>
<p>The Pacific Islands monument area not only lies across the most direct paths from the East China Sea to the Central Pacific, but is one of the most seamount-infested parts of the entire Pacific Ocean floor – especially compared to the floor of the Eastern Pacific.  Seamounts are good reference points for underwater navigation, but they’re also excellent baffles for longer-range sonar acoustics.</p></blockquote>
<p>These are <a href="http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/06/21/obamas-marine-protected-area-expansion-collision-course-national-security/">excerpts of a much larger and heavily illustrated article</a> written from an expert standpoint which is worth reading, but what it amounts to is that while Obama has been talking about a pivot to Asia, he has managed to undermine the US Navy against the PRC even much closer to home.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>John Bolton: &#8216;The Biggest Threat to National Security Is in the White House&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/john-bolton-the-biggest-threat-to-national-security-is-in-the-white-house/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=john-bolton-the-biggest-threat-to-national-security-is-in-the-white-house</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2014 04:55:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Bolton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226695</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amb. John Bolton discusses the threat within at the Freedom Center's Texas Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: Below are the video and transcript to Ambassador John Bolton&#8217;s address at the Freedom Center&#8217;s 2014 Texas Weekend. The event took place May 2nd-4th at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/96452968" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Daniel Pipes:</strong> Please join me in welcoming John Bolton.</span></p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>John Bolton:</strong> Thanks, Daniel.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m always delighted to be able to be part of a Freedom Center event.  The work that everybody does is just so important, and becomes more important.  So for all of you who are supporters, believe me, it&#8217;s support that&#8217;s put to very good use.  I can assure you of that.</p>
<p>I wanted to talk for just a little bit tonight about some of the problems that the United States and its friends in the world face.  And I&#8217;m acutely conscious that I&#8217;m the only thing now that stands between you and dinner.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So I&#8217;ll try and make these remarks as pointed as I can.</p>
<p>It is a very dangerous time for the United States and its friends in the world.  And in large measure, it&#8217;s not because of the individual crises that we see in the world around us.  The biggest threat to our national security is sitting the White House.  And it&#8217;s &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>It&#8217;s something that we never could&#8217;ve predicted.  It&#8217;s unquestionably the case in my view that the President&#8217;s the most radical President that we&#8217;ve ever had, and not just on domestic issues.  He has a fundamentally different view of America&#8217;s place in the world than any other President in history, to the point where I think most of us already look back at the Jimmy Carter Administration in the late 1970s as the good old days.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Which tells you something right there.</p>
<p>So before I get into some of the specifics, I want to talk about what it is about this President that makes him different, and the particular reasons that his worldview is so contrary to our national interest.</p>
<p>I think, to start with, it&#8217;s important to understand that the basic concept is he just doesn&#8217;t believe in American exceptionalism.  Now, this is a subject that&#8217;s controversial sometimes even with our friends when we talk about American exceptionalism.  My view it&#8217;s not a statement or a belief in American superiority; it&#8217;s a recognition that our history has been fundamentally different from virtually every other country around the world.</p>
<p>And it wasn&#8217;t the United States or its citizens that first proclaimed American exceptionalism; it was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in &#8220;Democracy in America,&#8221; his insightful analysis of the United States in the first part of the 19th century, said that it may be said of the Americans that they are truly exceptional, in that no other democratic people will repeat their experience.  And it&#8217;s right.  And it has shaped our view of America and America&#8217;s role in the world.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s sometimes controversial.  But the fact is that it&#8217;s been so widely shared among Americans that nobody&#8217;s ever really given it serious thought, until we got Obama.  And the views that he picked up during his time at Columbia and Harvard Law School, and working as a community organizer in Chicago, have made him fundamentally different.</p>
<p>Now, it&#8217;s quite interesting &#8212; in his first trip to Europe as President, a British reporter asked him if he believed in American exceptionalism.  That&#8217;s how apparent it was to the rest of the world that he didn&#8217;t that the reporter actually put the question to him.  And Obama&#8217;s answer, which a number of people have commented on since 2009, is worth reviewing again as we look at the policies he pursues today.  In response to this question, he said &#8212; yes, I believe in American exceptionalism, just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.</p>
<p>Now, let&#8217;s parse this sentence, which is classic Obama.  In the first third, he says &#8212; yeah, I believe in American exceptionalism.  So all those people who say that I don&#8217;t are wrong.  But then, in the second two thirds of the sentence, he takes it back by referring to the British and Greek views.</p>
<p>You know, there are 193 countries in the United Nations.  And he certainly could&#8217;ve gone on &#8212; just as the Papua New Guineans believe in Papua New Guinean exceptionalism &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; just as the Burkina Fasians believe in Burkina Fasian exceptionalism.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The point&#8217;s clear.  If everybody&#8217;s exceptional, then nobody&#8217;s exceptional.  And that&#8217;s what he really thinks.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s not the first Democratic Party leader to believe that.  I think if you go back to 1988, George H.W. Bush said about Michael Dukakis &#8212; &#8220;my opponent believes that the United States is a nice country out there somewhere on the UN roll call between Albania and Zimbabwe.&#8221;  In other words, just one more country.  That&#8217;s what they think.</p>
<p>And so, in his view, since America&#8217;s not exceptional, since we&#8217;re not different than any other country &#8212; we have our interests, they have their interests &#8212; he looks at American strength as part of the problem in the world &#8212; that we&#8217;re too much &#8212; we&#8217;re too assertive, too dominant, too successful, really, over the years.</p>
<p>And so in the Obama view, because our strength is part of the problem, one way to get to a more peaceful, more stable environment is for the United States to withdraw, to be less assertive, to be less in the world.</p>
<p>Now, I think this is like looking at the world through the wrong end of the telescope.  It&#8217;s not American strength that&#8217;s the problem; it&#8217;s American weakness that&#8217;s the problem.  And certainly, Obama is proving that on a daily basis.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s not, though &#8212; although his policies get you to a declining, withdrawing America, it&#8217;s not that he&#8217;s an isolationist, in the sense that we see a rising isolation in some parts of the Republican Party; he&#8217;s a multilateralist.</p>
<p>And he doesn&#8217;t view what happens in the world through a nationalist prism.  He said &#8212; and these are really chilling words, when you think about it &#8212; he said in 2009, in his first speech to the United Nations &#8212; it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009, more than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared.  No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.  No balance of power among nations will hold.</p>
<p>Now, that is a statement that essentially says everything that we&#8217;ve seen in, you know, roughly 100,000 years of human history doesn&#8217;t apply anymore.  Coincidentally, 2009, more than at any point in human history, when Barack Obama becomes President &#8212; which is when history begins for Barack Obama &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; these are core beliefs of his.  And they are reflected in his policy.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve worried for a long time what he meant when he said no world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.  I wondered, what is he talking about there?  What does he really mean?  And the more I looked it, it finally came to me &#8212; he&#8217;s talking about us.  He&#8217;s talking about us.  We&#8217;re one nation elevated over another, that&#8217;s not going to succeed.  So his determination is to make sure that in fact we are not the dominant power in the world.</p>
<p>Now again, this is not the first person to hold this view.  I think it&#8217;s very similar to what Woodrow Wilson believed, and caused us so much trouble.  Wilson said, in his famous Fourteen Points speech &#8212; the interests of all nations are also our own.  He talked about peace without victory in 1918.  And Wilson said &#8212; there must be not a balance of power, but a community of power.  And he wasn&#8217;t even a community organizer.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Not organized rivalries, but an organized common piece based on &#8212; listen to this &#8212; the moral force of the public opinion of the world.</p>
<p>Now, nobody&#8217;s ever told us how to get the public opinion of the world, unless you&#8217;re Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama and you know it.  I mean, it speaks to you.  This is a very, very precarious and dangerous basis for a President of the United States to make policy.  It is detached from the interest and views of the American people.  Because he&#8217;s listening to the public opinion of the world.</p>
<p>Now, the opposite view on this was expressed very clearly at the time by Theodore Roosevelt, when he was asked &#8212; well, what do you think of this business of making the world safe for democracy?  And Roosevelt, the Republican Roosevelt, said in response &#8212; first, we&#8217;re to make the world safe for ourselves.</p>
<p>And that is the real bedrock, or should be the bedrock, of American foreign policy.  We can&#8217;t shape the rest of the world, but we can shape it adequately to defend ourselves and to defend our interests around the world.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why when I hear within the Republican Party voices that hark back to the isolationism of the 1930s, I get worried.  Because by moving away from the Theodore Roosevelt view, they end up &#8212; although they start with a very different analytical premise &#8212; they end up in the same place as Barack Obama &#8212; that it&#8217;s America that causes the problems, and that if indifference to the world, withdrawing from the world, makes us less provocative, that that&#8217;s what we ought to do.</p>
<p>You know, that leads to a real absence of thinking about American national security.  We already see in the Democratic Party, they don&#8217;t have a national security wing anymore.  There&#8217;s no Scoop Jackson wing, there isn&#8217;t even a Joe Lieberman wing anymore.</p>
<p>And yet, we see within the Republican Party today a view of America&#8217;s place in the world that will fundamentally leave us in the same position as the Obama view, which is a weaker, less outward-looking, declinist America.</p>
<p>This is fundamentally the opposite of Ronald Reagan&#8217;s view of the world &#8212; the view that brought us to a successful conclusion in the Cold War, which rejected multilateralism, which rejected isolationism and which, in the phrase that Reagan used over and over again, was based on peace through strength.  That is, to achieve American objectives without the use of military force.</p>
<p>It is a way that protects America and its friends and allies because of the strength, military, political and economic, of our position.  It dissuades and deters adversaries from trying to take advantage of us.  And it recognizes that you are best able to achieve peace when you are strong &#8212; that it&#8217;s not American strength that&#8217;s provocative; it&#8217;s American weakness that&#8217;s provocative.  And that&#8217;s something that Obama, and some people in the Republican Party today, unfortunately, have never really understood &#8212; that it&#8217;s the first duty of the sovereign, as Adam Smith said, to protect the society against the violence of other societies.</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s a basic chore of government, and it&#8217;s something that really our way of life, our standard of living in the United States, depend on.  Whatever minimal order and stability there is in the world &#8212; and there&#8217;s very little of it &#8212; is because of the United States and its structure of alliances.  If we don&#8217;t fulfill that role, you&#8217;re going to have others attempting to fill the void, or you&#8217;re going to have anarchy.  And it&#8217;s going to be the worse for us here.</p>
<p>Now, many people complain &#8212; and rightfully so &#8212; that other countries benefit from this and don&#8217;t pay their fair share, they don&#8217;t bear their fair share of the burden; that&#8217;s true.  And it&#8217;s something we should try and fix.  But let&#8217;s be clear &#8212; we&#8217;re not doing this for them; we&#8217;re doing it for us.  And there isn&#8217;t anybody else that can cover our back if we&#8217;re not able to do it.</p>
<p>And I&#8217;m afraid that the proof of this is something that we see around us in the world almost everywhere.  And I think that, in fact, I worry that over the next three years, the pace and the scope of the challenges that the United States faces is going to grow.  Because our adversaries and our friends have watched the Obama Administration in its first nearly five years in office.  They fully understand what the President&#8217;s about.  And those who want to take advantage of us understand that the 2016 election may bring something very, very different.  So if you want to move on your agenda contrary to American interests, this is the time to do it.</p>
<p>And you can pick so many places around the world where this is evident.  Let&#8217;s just start with Russia and Ukraine.  You know, this problem has been evident for quite some time.  If you go back to 2006, when he was last president of Russia, Vladimir Putin said &#8212; the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and a tragedy for the Russian people.  He was saying even then that his objective was to reestablish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union.  Not necessarily to take it over again, because I don&#8217;t think he wanted the problems that the newly independent republics had.  But he wanted Russian domination.</p>
<p>And I think the West understood that.  I think that&#8217;s one reason we expanded NATO membership to Eastern and Central Europe.  I think it&#8217;s why we put the Baltic Republics in NATO.  But we failed to follow our own logic.  We left a gap between NATO&#8217;s eastern border and Russia&#8217;s western border &#8212; Ukraine, Georgia, and other countries.</p>
<p>George W. Bush moved to try and fill that gap in April of 2008 &#8212; to bring Georgia and Ukraine on a clearly defined path to NATO membership, to end the ambiguity and to allow those countries to join the West, and to pick up that space for Europe and the United States.  The Europeans, even then fearful of what Russia might do with their oil and gas supplies, rejected the Bush proposal.</p>
<p>And four months later &#8212; this is kind of like a laboratory experiment you don&#8217;t often get in international affairs &#8212; four months later, the Russians invaded Georgia and carved off two provinces of Georgia that they still hold onto.</p>
<p>Now, at the time of that Russian attack, Barack Obama, candidate for President of the United States, was asked what he thought about it.  And his first response &#8212; he later walked away from it, but his first response was to call on both Russia and Georgia to exercise restraint.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I mean, just think about that for a minute.  He had to &#8212; as I say, he had to reverse that position.  But in the Kremlin, they took very careful note of what his first reaction was.</p>
<p>So, Obama comes into office.  He could be thinking about the strategic implications of what Russia had just done in Georgia.  But instead, he spends his time pressing the famous reset button, giving up bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, where we would&#8217;ve put missile defense assets to protect the United States itself, to protect us in the homeland, against the potential for ballistic missile attack with nuclear warheads from rogue states in the Middle East.  He gave that up.  Because the Russians were afraid of it.</p>
<p>He gave the Russians the New START Arms Control Treaty.  Very ill advised.  He gave concession after concession to the Russians in controversy after controversy.  And as was entirely predictable and in fact predicted by some of us, the Russians did what they did during the Cold War.  They took one concession after another.  They put it in their pocket and said &#8212; what have you got for me next?</p>
<p>So Obama today is utterly unprepared for what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine.  Putin suffered a setback when the Yanukovych government was overthrown.  And he&#8217;s systematically, for the past three months, going about reversing that.  And he&#8217;s accomplishing it.  Even the New York Times today had to admit that the economic sanctions the President&#8217;s put in place have been utterly ineffective in deterring Russian conduct.</p>
<p>And let&#8217;s be clear what Putin has done here.  First, in 2008 &#8212; but even more boldly in the past few months &#8212; he has used military force on the continent of Europe to change international boundaries.  And in response, the West has done nothing.  So that the signal to Putin and all the other former Soviet Republics is basically &#8212; you&#8217;re on your own.</p>
<p>Moreover &#8212; and we have to acknowledge the problem &#8212; the European response, if anything, has been weaker than Obama&#8217;s.  That&#8217;s not an excuse for anybody.  It&#8217;s a cause of a cyclical problem, where Obama can say &#8212; well, you know, the Europeans really aren&#8217;t up for tough sanctions.  And therefore, I don&#8217;t have to do anything.  And the Europeans can say &#8212; well, the Americans aren&#8217;t leading.  So we&#8217;re not going to lead, either.  And this downward cycle simply encourages Putin to continue his agitation, his destabilizing of Ukraine, to achieve the objective he wants, which is regime in Kiev that&#8217;s compliant with his wishes.</p>
<p>But the signal to others, to the Baltic Republics who are NATO members, leaves them in fear.  Because they now worry that Obama, even though they&#8217;re NATO members, won&#8217;t protect them, either.  And I think Putin didn&#8217;t start out this way.  But he sees a chance &#8212; potentially, potentially &#8212; to shatter the NATO alliance, something he never could&#8217;ve dreamed of four or five years ago.</p>
<p>So when you add to the internal problems of the European Union, the possibility of the post-Cold War arrangement in Europe coming unstuck, I think is rising.  And it&#8217;s rising in substantial measure because of the absence of any American leadership.</p>
<p>Now, there&#8217;s no country in the world watching what&#8217;s happening in Ukraine, other than the participants themselves &#8212; nobody watching it more closely than China.  Because China is engaged in its own expansionist effort in the waters off its seacoast.  And this is an issue vastly underreported in the United States, even with the President&#8217;s recent trip to Asia.  It&#8217;s like it just &#8212; it&#8217;s too hard for people in the media to cover.</p>
<p>Certainly, Obama didn&#8217;t give them any reason to cover it while he was in Asia, because he simply repeated the same policies that his administration has pursued for five years.  And they are policies that are failing in the face of an increasingly assertive China.</p>
<p>You know, in the government, and even in American business circles, there&#8217;s a kind of a mantra that China&#8217;s engaged in a peaceful rise, and it&#8217;s going to be a responsible stakeholder in world affairs.  Well, okay.  That&#8217;s possible; a lot of things are possible.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not the most likely scenario by a long shot.  In fact, China&#8217;s modernizing its army, it&#8217;s building up its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons capabilities.  It&#8217;s creating a blue-water navy for the first time in 600 years.  It has one of the world&#8217;s &#8212; certainly the most aggressive and one of the most sophisticated programs in cyber warfare.  It has developed anti-satellite weapons to blind our capabilities to surveil China from space.  It has extensive development of what are called anti-access area denial weapon capabilities to push the US Navy back from the Western shores of the Pacific, where we&#8217;ve been dominant since World War II.  And all the while, it is making territorial claims in the East and South China Sea that make what the Russians are doing in Ukraine look timid.</p>
<p>Now, people say that these claims are these little rocks and reefs and islands that are barely above water at low tide, and that&#8217;s true.  But they&#8217;re not the issue.  The issue is whether China can break free of the island chain that prevents it from getting out into the Pacific, and whether they can turn the South China Sea into a Chinese lake, taking it from being international waterways to being Chinese water.</p>
<p>What difference does that make?  Well, if you&#8217;re in Japan or South Korea or Taiwan, all of your oil from the Middle East comes through the South China Sea.  So if China makes that a territorial lake, they&#8217;ve got their hands around the throats of the economy of Japan and the other countries, and puts them in an enormous position to affect Southeast Asia, which is obviously &#8212; all of the trade and investment and commerce we have with East and Southeast Asia is at risk.  And this is at a time when the American Navy has the lowest number of warships at sea since 1916.</p>
<p>And you know, Romney tried to raise this during the debate with Obama.  And Obama&#8217;s response was again &#8212; it&#8217;s very revealing.  He didn&#8217;t have an answer; he had snark.  He said &#8212; well, you know, our ships are much more sophisticated than the ships of 1916.  We have submarines, we have aircraft carriers.  So, you know, you&#8217;re just counting numbers.</p>
<p>Well, that would be a good answer if the ships of our adversaries had been built in 1916.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Unfortunately, they&#8217;re not.  They&#8217;re building ships that are just as sophisticated as ours are.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s where the blindness of Obama&#8217;s vision is so important.  He just doesn&#8217;t see how declining American strength affects others &#8212; the Japanese are very worried, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, obviously, most worried of all.  The Indians are now very worried about what this rising Chinese capacity means.  And they see no answers from the United States.  And when they look at Ukraine, and they see actual military territorial aggression, and no American response, you can imagine what conclusion they draw.</p>
<p>But to me, the biggest threats that we face in the near term are the continuing threats of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction &#8212; nuclear weapons especially.</p>
<p>And here, the Obama Administration has failed completely.  They&#8217;ve failed to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, they&#8217;ve made a deal with Iran that essentially legitimizes Iran&#8217;s uranium enrichment capability.  Iran made superficial, easily reversible concessions on its nuclear program.  And in return, they blew a hole through the international sanctions, which were not slowing down the nuclear weapons program but were imposing a cost on the Iranian economy.</p>
<p>They&#8217;ve done nothing in the White House to stop the North Korean program.  And there&#8217;s ample evidence that Iran and North Korea are cooperating on ballistic missiles for sure, and quite possibly on the nuclear weapons side as well.</p>
<p>This is, again, a huge lesson to our adversaries &#8212; to any would-be nuclear weapon state &#8212; that if you are simply persistent enough, you too can have nuclear weapons.  And the threat that that poses to Israel, to friendly states in the Middle East, is really extraordinary.</p>
<p>You know, Israel is a small country.  Half a dozen nuclear detonations &#8212; there is no more Israel.  That&#8217;s why Ariel Sharon once described it to President Bush as the threat of a nuclear holocaust.  And he was not exaggerating.</p>
<p>The Iranian nuclear weapons program is not Israel&#8217;s problem; it&#8217;s our problem.  Because we&#8217;re the only country ultimately that can stop would-be proliferators from getting the capability.  And yet, we&#8217;re doing nothing, which is why the spotlight is on Israel to take the very hard decision, whether they will, as they have twice before in Israel&#8217;s history, strike a nuclear weapons program in the hands of a hostile state.</p>
<p>Frankly, if I were in Israel, I&#8217;d have done this five years ago.  And I think they&#8217;re wasting time.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And I think it will be incredibly important for the United States to come to Israel&#8217;s defense if we wake up one morning and find that they are already attacking Iran.  This will be an entirely legitimate exercise of Israel&#8217;s inherent right of self defense.  And the United States ought to say that immediately after we learn that the attack has begun.  We ought to resupply Israel militarily immediately.  And frankly, we ought to do a lot more.  I just don&#8217;t think the Obama Administration will do anything.</p>
<p>And the Iranians understand that.  They don&#8217;t believe the President when he says all options are on the table.  I don&#8217;t even think the President believes the President &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; when he says that.</p>
<p>And the Iranian nuclear threat is not simply a regional threat in the Middle East.  It forms the basis of the risk of a perfect storm with terrorists &#8212; that Iran would supply nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda or others that they don&#8217;t need a ballistic missile to deliver, that they can put in a boxcar, put in a ship, sail it into any harbor in this country or anywhere in the world and detonate it.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s where, really, the threat of international terrorism remains so acute.  Now, we&#8217;ve had developments just this week on one of the central issues of the war on terrorism &#8212; the attack on Benghazi on September the 11th, 2012, with the revelation of what we knew all along &#8212; that the White House had no intention of being candid about what happened in that attack.  But also, today, as I think most of you probably heard, Speaker Boehner has finally announced the formation of a select committee in the House which will unify &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; the investigative efforts from six committees, six committees, into one.</p>
<p>And as I said to a few of you before dinner, I was at the Justice Department when we had to face in the Reagan Administration the Iran Contra select committee.  And let me tell you, it is a powerful, powerful tool in the congressional arsenal.  And the fact that we&#8217;re finally going to have it, I think, could make a real difference.</p>
<p>But the fundamental point on the ground in the region remains that the threat of international terrorism is just as acute today as it was before 9/11.  The administration&#8217;s own Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said as much two months ago in testimony before Congress.  It&#8217;s a different structure for al-Qaeda than it was before the first 9/11.  But if anything, it&#8217;s a graver threat because it&#8217;s metastasized into countries all over the region.  And other terrorists have come along.  We&#8217;ve seen what they&#8217;ve been able to do in Iraq, what they&#8217;re doing today in Syria.</p>
<p>And so the whole approach of the administration, which is to say &#8212; well, we&#8217;ve hurt al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we were able to kill Osama bin Laden &#8212; and therefore, what they define as core al-Qaeda has been weakened.</p>
<p>Now, it&#8217;s not like al-Qaeda sat around in caves in Afghanistan drawing corporate organization charts and working out exactly how they were going to do things.  They had objectives.  They knew that different people would be attracted to their efforts for different reasons, and they accepted that.  And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happened since 9/11.</p>
<p>While Obama has focused on defining terrorism down to Al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda down to core al-Qaeda, and core al-Qaeda down to Osama bin Laden so he can take credit for it; the rest of the terrorists have been ignoring this esoteric discussion and conducting terrorist operations.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s what the attack in Benghazi was, and why it was such a threat to the administration&#8217;s entire tissue fabric of argument that al-Qaeda was on the run, Osama bin Laden was dead and General Motors was alive.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They knew that if people really understood what had happened at Benghazi, the American public would understand that the threat of international terrorism is very real.</p>
<p>So the whole argument about how they had failed to understand that Libya was dissolving into anarchy, that the terrorists had come back to use it for training and for base camps; and that therefore, the notion that the Arab Spring had brought progress to the Middle East and reduced the threat of terrorism was fundamentally wrong.  They did nothing in the months before the September 11th attack to build up capabilities in the region to protect not just our diplomats but American citizens who are even more vulnerable than people in the embassies and consulates.</p>
<p>You know, in February of 2011, we withdrew all civilian personnel from Libya.  This was at the time Khadafi was about to fall.  Things were very dangerous.  We didn&#8217;t have naval assets that could bring those people out.  We had to rent a ferryboat in Greece and bring it to Tripoli to pull the Americans out.</p>
<p>So from February of 2011 to September of 2012, what did we do to put capabilities in the region to protect Americans who might be at risk?  Zero.  That&#8217;s what we did.  Zero.</p>
<p>You know, Americans don&#8217;t realize that the Sixth Fleet, our Mediterranean fleet, on a permanent basis, consists of one ship &#8212; the flagship in Italy.  The rest of the Sixth Fleet is whatever happens to be going between the Strait of Magellan and the Suez Canal at any given time.  We don&#8217;t have the capability in the Mediterranean anymore.  And that&#8217;s the result of years of budget cuts.  And it is a tragedy, and it&#8217;s embarrassing.  And we saw the impact on 9/11 in Benghazi.</p>
<p>Could we have done anything on that day?  People whose military judgment and understanding out of respect say no.  I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s an excuse; I think it&#8217;s a confirmation that we failed in the months before that attack to be ready for it and to protect Americans in danger elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.</p>
<p>But the worst part of it is not the failure before 9/11, not the failures on 9/11; but the failures since the attack in Benghazi.  And this to me is both the most troubling and the most indicative of what&#8217;s wrong with the Obama foreign policy.</p>
<p>You know, an American ambassador in a foreign country not only presides over an embassy staff from all different departments &#8212; Agriculture, Defense, as well as State &#8212; the ambassador is the President&#8217;s personal representative to the country where he or she is accredited, the President&#8217;s personal representative.  When the ambassador drives around the capital city, the American flag flies from the right front fender of their car.  Everybody knows what the American ambassador does.</p>
<p>So, let&#8217;s be clear &#8212; what happened in Benghazi, with four Americans being murdered, was a tragedy for all of them.  But in particular, it showed that the terrorists could kill the personal representative of the President of the United States and have nothing happen to them &#8212; that under Barack Obama, you can murder his personal representative and get away scot free.</p>
<p>That is a terrible lesson for the terrorists, the state sponsors of terrorists, and our adversaries generally, to learn.  It is a sign for 20 months &#8212; 20 months!  We&#8217;ve done nothing.  Not only have we not arrested anybody; there&#8217;s no revenge, no retaliation, no retribution, and no prospect that anything&#8217;s going to happen.</p>
<p>So this signal of American weakness, I think, is something they understand in the Kremlin.  They understand it in Beijing, they understand it in Tehran, they understand it all around the world.  They understand it in the capitals of our allies, too &#8212; that if the Obama Administration won&#8217;t even go after people who are killing his representative, who are they going to come to defend?  How can you trust the word of the United States to meet its commitments when they won&#8217;t even defend their own people?</p>
<p>This is something that I think we need much more discussion of at the national level.  And maybe this select committee will help jog the national media into doing it.</p>
<p>But fundamentally, it&#8217;s for American citizens.  You know, we get the kind of government that we deserve.  And if we don&#8217;t make national security a higher priority going forward, if we don&#8217;t insist that our candidates for President and Senate and House explain to us how they&#8217;re going to protect America, then we&#8217;re not doing our job.</p>
<p>So I think, looking forward to this November, looking forward to the 2016 election, we&#8217;ve got to re-center this debate.  And we&#8217;ve got to demand of candidates at the presidential and congressional level that they explain whether or not they agree with Ronald Reagan&#8217;s view of peace through strength, and that a strong America is the best way not only to protect our interests, but to protect our interests and preserve the peace.  This is absolutely critical to ourselves and our friends around the world.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
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		<title>The Obama Undoctrine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-undoctrine</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 04:58:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226472</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Foreign policy that stands for everything and nothing. And has accomplished nothing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226482 alignleft" alt="BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Afghanistan is lost, Iraq and Libya are in the middle of civil wars, Russia is carving off pieces of Ukraine and China is escalating its conflict with the rest of Asia. There isn’t a single element of Obama’s foreign policy that has proven successful. Instead it’s been one international disaster after another.</span></p>
<p>Obama just smiles into the camera and announces that “America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world.” Anyone who disagrees is engaging in partisan politics. Or reading statistics.</p>
<p>Having signed off on Iran’s nuclear program while its Supreme Leader boasts that the holy war will only end with America’s destruction, he claims that the “odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low.”</p>
<p>“From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations,” he proclaims. Meanwhile Russia and China humiliate our European and Asian allies for their worthless alliance hub.</p>
<p>“When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help,” he boasts.</p>
<p>And yet the masked men go on occupying buildings and Boko Haram goes on killing Nigerians. America has never been stronger than under Obama. And yet it’s incapable of actually doing anything, except maybe joining New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, Israel and Chile in providing disaster aid to the Philippines.</p>
<p>And if that doesn’t work, he can always sanction the typhoon. It should do as much to stop the wall of water it as it did to stop Russia and Iran.</p>
<p>Obama’s speeches come from a world that exists only inside his own teleprompter. Another leader might have been reeling from a string of international failures, but he boldly triumphs over reality. The worse things are, the bigger the party he throws to celebrate his victories.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech focuses on Afghanistan, but never mentions the Taliban. Imagine an FDR speech that pretended that Japan didn’t exist. That’s the depth of denial it takes for Obama to claim victory.</p>
<p>After using up the lives of 1,600 American soldiers fighting the Taliban without ever defeating them, he takes a victory lap for defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the CIA had told him back in 2009 that there were at most 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Thousands of Americans have been lost to an enemy whose existence Obama won’t even acknowledge as he takes another victory lap for losing another war.</p>
<p>With the VA scandal reminding everyone that he doesn’t just throw away the lives of soldiers abroad, but also at home, Obama is changing the subject with one Mission Accomplished speech after another. Like a politician caught with his mistress who begins taking his wife everywhere, he is suddenly in love with the military and can’t get enough photo ops with anyone wearing a uniform.</p>
<p>Even if they work for the post office.</p>
<p>In Obama’s teleprompter reality, a withdrawal is equivalent to success. Setting a withdrawal timeline with no regard for results deserves a victory parade. He wants credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of his term. Not only is he repeating the timeline mistake of his disastrous surge, but the timeline is once again pegged to a political, rather than a strategic, date.</p>
<p>Obama takes credit for troop removals, rather than outcomes. But if he doesn’t care that Al Qaeda in Iraq is more powerful than ever or that the Taliban control the future of Afghanistan, why didn’t he immediately withdraw the troops? Are we supposed to cheer his inability to either commit to winning a war or pull out? Is indecisiveness the virtue of a great leader?</p>
<p>Do we really need more applause lines about how long it took him to lose a war?</p>
<p>The West Point commencement address dresses up past failures as new successes and lays out a vision for the future by a lame duck leader who has failed at every foreign policy initiative. The address is an expanded version of his 2002 anti-war speech as a Chicago state senator that first brought him to the attention of his future backers. It straddles an awkward line between anti-war and interventionism.</p>
<p>Twelve years later, Obama hasn’t changed.</p>
<p>He’s still posturing as a fake centrist by setting up interventionist and isolationist straw men on both sides. Instead of defending his policies on their merits, he tries to make them seem reasonable by depicting his critics on the right and the left as extremists. After six years of foreign affairs failures, Obama is still talking as if he’s the &#8220;reasonable&#8221; centrist trying to steer a&#8221;‘sensible common sense&#8221; path.</p>
<p>At least those are the favorite buzzwords that his speechwriters throw in to influence the “folks.”</p>
<p>Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants applause for being an interventionist and for being a non-interventionist. In one sentence he sounds like JFK and in another like Eugene McCarthy.</p>
<p>He wants to send in the troops and then get credit for pulling them out. He wants to threaten other countries and then appease them at the negotiating table. He wants to set red lines he doesn’t stand behind and apply sanctions that mean nothing. And he wants to pass off this game in which the bad guys always win and America always loses as his smart power doctrine.</p>
<p>That’s not a doctrine. That’s an undoctrine.</p>
<p>The Obama Undoctrine is all things to all people. It respects international opinion, except when it doesn’t. It doesn’t believe in military solutions, but sometimes it does. It believes in taking military action to protect our interests, rather than foreign human rights, except when it believes the opposite.</p>
<p>In Libya, Obama sent in the jets when Libyans in Benghazi were threatened, but not when Americans in Benghazi were threatened.</p>
<p>The world may look to America for help, but Americans shouldn’t.</p>
<p>The shiny new Obama Undoctrine proposes such groundbreaking ideas as partnering with countries fighting terrorism. This is a bold new idea from the &#8217;50s. Other bold new ideas include using international institutions like the League of Nations, ahem, the United Nations, to stop new wars from starting.</p>
<p>Anyone who wants an example of the “leadership” and “strength” of the Undoctrine should look at Iran. That’s not some nasty Republican sneering at the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>It’s Obama’s assertion in his address.</p>
<p>After admitting that any nuclear agreement with Iran is a long shot, he says of his appeasement, “This is American leadership. This is American strength.”</p>
<p>Obama’s idea of American leadership and strength is being repeatedly humiliated and led around by the nose by a bitter enemy determined to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the United States.</p>
<p>If that’s Obama’s idea of leadership and strength, just imagine his idea of weakness.</p>
<p>Then there’s NATO. He describes it as “the strongest alliance the world has ever known.” That would have sounded more impressive before NATO staked out Ukraine for the bear and went home.</p>
<p>And if you want something more effective, try the UN. While Obama cuts the military to the bone, he will be “investing” more money in UN peacekeeping operations.</p>
<p>If we’re going to spend all that money on a military, it should be one that doesn’t run away at the first sign of trouble. That way we would at least be getting some bang for our buck. But maybe a small army of child molesters spreading cholera that runs away at the first sign of trouble embodies the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” Obama declared. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</p>
<p>Or as his nursery school teacher probably put it, “You’re special. Just like everyone else.”</p>
<p>This mess of contradictions is the Obama Undoctrine. It stands for everything and nothing. And it has accomplished nothing.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Disappearance of US Will</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-disappearance-of-us-will/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-disappearance-of-us-will</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Apr 2014 04:53:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223686</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America retreats -- and the world becomes more dangerous than ever. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/obama-foreign-policy-policy-second-term-john-bolton-620x396.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223691" alt="obama-foreign-policy-policy-second-term-john-bolton-620x396" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/obama-foreign-policy-policy-second-term-john-bolton-620x396-450x287.jpg" width="270" height="172" /></a>Originally published at the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-one-The-disappearance-of-US-will-349808">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>The most terrifying aspect of the collapse of US power worldwide is the US’s indifferent response to it.</p>
<p>In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, America’s most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades.</p>
<p>As Gordon Chang noted at a symposium in Los Angeles last month hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, since President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, the Chinese have responded to his overtures of goodwill and appeasement with intensified aggression against the US’s Asian allies and against US warships.</p>
<p>In 2012, China seized the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines. Washington shrugged its shoulders despite its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And so Beijing is striking again, threatening the Second Thomas Shoal, another Philippine possession.</p>
<p>In a similar fashion, Beijing is challenging Japan’s control over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea and even making territorial claims on Okinawa.</p>
<p>As Chang explained, China’s recent application of its Air-Defense Identification Zone to include Japanese and South Korean airspace is a hostile act not only against those countries but also against the principle of freedom of maritime navigation, which, Chang noted, “Americans have been defending for more than two centuries.”</p>
<p>The US has responded to Chinese aggression with ever-escalating attempts to placate Beijing.</p>
<p>And China has responded to these US overtures by demonstrating contempt for US power.</p>
<p>Last week, the Chinese humiliated Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during his visit to China’s National Defense University. He was harangued by a student questioner for the US’s support for the Philippines and Japan, and for opposition to Chinese unilateral seizure of island chains and assertions of rights over other states’ airspace and international waterways.</p>
<p>As he stood next to Hagel in a joint press conference, China’s Defense Chief Chang Wanquan demanded that the US restrain Japan and the Philippines.</p>
<p>In addition to its flaccid responses to Chinese aggression against its allies and its own naval craft, in 2012 the US averred from publicly criticizing China for its sale to North Korea of mobile missile launchers capable of serving Pyongyang’s KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missiles. With these easily concealed launchers, North Korea significantly upgraded its ability to attack the US with nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>As for Europe, the Obama administration’s responses to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and to its acts of aggression against Ukraine bespeak a lack of seriousness and dangerous indifference to the fate of the US alliance structure in Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Rather than send NATO forces to the NATO member Baltic states, and arm Ukrainian forces with defensive weapons, as Russian forces began penetrating Ukraine, the US sent food to Ukraine and an unarmed warship to the Black Sea.</p>
<p>Clearly not impressed by the US moves, the Russians overflew and shadowed the US naval ship. As Charles Krauthammer noted on Fox News on Monday, the Russian action was not a provocation. It was “a show of contempt.”</p>
<p>As Krauthammer explained, it could have only been viewed as a provocation if Russia had believed the US was likely to respond to its shadowing of the warship. Since Moscow correctly assessed that the US would not respond to its aggression, by buzzing and following the warship, the Russians demonstrated to Ukraine and other US allies that they cannot trust the US to protect them from Russia.</p>
<p>In the Middle East, it is not only the US’s obsessive approach to the Palestinian conflict with Israel that lies in shambles. The entire US alliance system and the Obama administration’s other signature initiatives have also collapsed.</p>
<p>After entering office, Obama implemented an aggressive policy in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere of killing al-Qaida operatives with unmanned drones. The strategy was based on the notion that such a campaign, that involves no US boots on the ground, can bring about a rout of the terrorist force at minimal human cost to the US and at minimal political cost to President Barack Obama.</p>
<p>The strategy has brought about the demise of a significant number of al-Qaida terrorists over the years. And due to the support Obama enjoys from the US media, the Obama administration paid very little in terms of political capital for implementing it.</p>
<p>But despite the program’s relative success, according to The Washington Post, the administration suspended drone attacks in December 2013 after it endured modest criticism when one in Yemen inadvertently hit a wedding party.</p>
<p>No doubt al-Qaida noticed the program’s suspension. And now the terror group is flaunting its immunity from US attack.</p>
<p>This week, jihadist websites featured an al-Qaida video showing hundreds of al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen meeting openly with the group’s second in command, Nasir al-Wuhayshi.</p>
<p>In the video, Wuhayshi threatened the US directly saying, “We must eliminate the cross,” and explaining that “the bearer of the cross is America.”</p>
<p>Then there is Iran.</p>
<p>The administration has staked its reputation on its radical policy of engaging Iran on its nuclear weapons program. The administration claims that by permitting Iran to undertake some nuclear activities it can convince the mullahs to shelve their plan to develop nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>This week brought further evidence of the policy’s complete failure. It also brought further proof that the administration is unperturbed by evidence of failure.</p>
<p>In a televised interview Sunday, Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akhbar Salehi insisted that Iran has the right to enrich uranium to 90 percent. In other words, he said that Iran is building nuclear bombs.</p>
<p>And thanks to the US and its interim nuclear deal with Iran, the Iranian economy is on the mend.</p>
<p>The interim nuclear deal the Obama administration signed with Iran last November was supposed to limit its oil exports to a million barrels a day. But according to the International Energy Agency, in February, Iran’s daily oil exports rose to 1.65 million barrels a day, the highest level since June 2012.</p>
<p>Rather than accept that its efforts have failed, the Obama administration is redefining what success means.</p>
<p>As Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz noted, in recent months US officials claimed the goal of the nuclear talks was to ensure that Iran would remain years away from acquiring nuclear weapons. In recent remarks, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the US would suffice with a situation in which Iran is but six months away from acquiring nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>In other words, the US has now defined failure as success.</p>
<p>Then there is Syria.</p>
<p>Last September, the US claimed it made history when, together with Russia it convinced dictator Bashar Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal. Six months later, not only is Syria well behind schedule for abiding by the agreement, it is reportedly continuing to use chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians. The most recent attack reportedly occurred on April 12 when residents of Kafr Zita were attacked with chlorine gas.</p>
<p>The growing worldwide contempt for US power and authority would be bad enough in and of itself. The newfound confidence of aggressors imperils international security and threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people.</p>
<p>What makes the situation worse is the US response to what is happening. The Obama administration is responding to the ever-multiplying crises by pretending that there is nothing to worry about and insisting that failures are successes.</p>
<p>And the problem is not limited to Obama and his advisers or even to the political Left. Their delusional view that the US will suffer no consequences for its consistent record of failure and defeat is shared by a growing chorus of conservatives.</p>
<p>Some, like the anti-Semitic conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, laud Putin as a cultural hero. Others, like Sen. Rand Paul, who is increasingly presenting himself as the man to beat in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, indicate that the US has no business interfering with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.</p>
<p>Iran as well is a country the US should be less concerned about, in Paul’s opinion.</p>
<p>Leaders like Sen. Ted Cruz who call for a US foreign policy based on standing by allies and opposing foes in order to ensure US leadership and US national security are being drowned out in a chorus of “Who cares?” Six years into Obama’s presidency, the US public as a whole is largely opposed to taking any action on behalf of Ukraine or the Baltic states, regardless of what inaction, or worse, feckless action means for the US’s ability to protect its interests and national security.</p>
<p>And the generation coming of age today is similarly uninterested in US global leadership.</p>
<p>During the Cold War and in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the predominant view among American university students studying international affairs was that US world leadership is essential to ensure global stability and US national interests and values.</p>
<p>Today this is no longer the case.</p>
<p>Much of the Obama administration’s shuttle diplomacy in recent years has involved sending senior officials, including Obama, on overseas trips with the goal of reassuring jittery allies that they can continue to trust US security guarantees.</p>
<p>These protestations convince fewer and fewer people today.</p>
<p>It is because of this that US allies like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, that lack nuclear weapons, are considering their options on the nuclear front.</p>
<p>It is because of this that Israeli officials are openly stating for the first time that the US cannot be depended on to either secure Israel’s eastern frontier in the event that an accord is reached with the Palestinians, or to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>It is because of this that the world is more likely than it has been since 1939 to experience a world war of catastrophic proportions.</p>
<p>There is a direct correlation between the US elite’s preoccupation with social issues running the narrow and solipsistic gamut from gay marriage to transgender bathrooms to a phony war against women, and America’s inability to recognize the growing threats to the global order or understand why Americans should care about the world at all.</p>
<p>And there is a similarly direct correlation between the growing aggression of US foes and Obama’s decision to slash defense spending while allowing the US nuclear arsenal to become all but obsolete.</p>
<p>America’s spurned allies will take the actions they need to take to protect themselves. Some will persevere, others will likely be overrun.</p>
<p>But with Americans across the ideological spectrum pretending that failure is success and defeat is victory, while turning their backs on the growing storm, how will America protect itself?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>America Besieged</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/america-besieged/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-besieged</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 04:57:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223159</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A distinguished panel at the West Coast Retreat confronts the dire threats facing the U.S.A. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/alf.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223210" alt="Fighters of al-Qaeda linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant parade at Syrian town of Tel Abyad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/alf-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a><strong>Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of the panel America Besieged at the Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat, held at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California from March 21-23, 2014:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/90984414" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> Only two U.S. presidents in modern times never wore the uniform of the United States, draft dodger Bill Clinton and the current commander in chief, who repeatedly called our troops &#8220;corpse-men.&#8221; In 2008, when the completely inexperienced Barack Hussein Obama ran to the far left edge of the Democratic Party, with a single foreign policy idea and constituency, anti-war, and won his nomination and then beat a long-time senator from the Armed Services Committee, a Navy veteran and honored POW, John McCain, we knew we were going to be in for a rough time in global affairs.</p>
<p>Obama told 200,000 cheering Berliners he was a citizen of the world.  And then he told the American people that the U.S. was not particularly exceptional and that he would make us more popular, perhaps, by using what the 2004 Democratic candidate, John Kerry, now the secretary of state, called a global test for U.S. action and leadership.  Early signs in the first term were not promising: offense to the British with the removal of the bust of Winston Churchill from the oval office, a gift after 911, apology tours and mugging with the likes of Chavez, pandering to Arabie with lies about the Muslim role in the founding of the U.S., bullying of Israel, dismissal of allies, such as the Poles and Czechs, missile defense.  Essentially, the Obama Doctrine:  hug thugs and offend our friends.  For this, the lovely lefties of Europe gave Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shares with the godfather of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.</p>
<p>The first term saw red lines, unenforced reset buttons, dithering, leading from behind, moral equivalency, failure to complete missions, alliances ignored, withdrawal.  The second term has been far worse, including the Benghazi disaster.  I&#8217;ll leave it to our distinguished panel to document the current state of international crises and concerns and the readiness of the U.S. military and public to engage in a dangerous world under Barack Obama.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Ledeen:</strong> Last night, listening to Glenn Beck, I said to myself well, this is a great routine, and what&#8217;s great about it is that it&#8217;s upbeat, is that the bottom line is we can win this thing if we just do the right things.  So, I thought to myself why should I join the chorus of doom and gloom as we always do?  These panels, we always pound our chests, and we always say oy, oy, things are terrible and things are getting worse and then, probably, they&#8217;re going to get worse, still.</p>
<p>So, I thought I would try to lift your spirits a little bit this morning and start by giving Larry his glasses back just to show that we&#8217;re really on good terms.</p>
<p>Okay.  Let&#8217;s look at the Middle East for a minute.  You all know all the bad news from the Middle East.  We get it all the time.  Man, we&#8217;ve analyzed it to death.  By now, if you look at the polling on Iran, which is my particular compulsive obsession or obsessive compulsion, whichever it is, the American people know perfectly well all about Iran, and they&#8217;re quite well oriented on Iran.  They think Iran&#8217;s a big enemy, they don&#8217;t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, they know Iran&#8217;s the world&#8217;s biggest supporter of terrorism and on and on.  So, they would like to see us have better policy toward Iran, and so do I, and we&#8217;re not going to have it under this president or this administration.  It&#8217;s not going to happen.</p>
<p>Why?  Because we have with Obama the first not post-American president, we have the first anti-American president.  And, and it is very hard for people around the world to come to grips with the fact that we have twice elected a president who does not like America and does not like Americans.  And he says that, it&#8217;s no secret, he believes we are responsible for most of the world&#8217;s basic problems, and so the way to cure the world&#8217;s basic problems is to rein us in, is to deprive us of the capacity to act.  And so a weaker military and so a weaker economy and so don&#8217;t support Freedom Fighters even verbally, et cetera, et cetera.  So, he&#8217;s done this now for, what is it, going on six years, and the results are clear.  Our enemies are encouraged, our friends tend to be discouraged and so forth, and yet, that&#8217;s the good news, of which there&#8217;s quite a lot if you look at the world from the standpoint of our enemies.</p>
<p>Suppose you&#8217;re in charge of Iran and you look around the Middle East.  Just a few years ago, Mubarak fell with Obama&#8217;s help and support, and the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt.  Now, where I live in Washington, every Egyptian expert that I know, without exception, said well, that&#8217;s it for Egypt for at least a generation because these people have prepared to take over Egypt for 80 years.  The Muslim brothers have been waiting 80 years to get that, and they know what to do.  And it reminded me a lot of what I always used to say, as it turned out wrong, about the Italian Communist Party when we were living in Italy.  And I would say well, the difference between this leftist party and various others is that they have real contracts, and they come from the real thing.  They&#8217;re trained by the KGB.  They go to Moscow every summer.  They know how to do it, and if they ever take over, they&#8217;ll be in for a generation or two or three or whatever.</p>
<p>So, in the fullness of time, the Berlin Wall fell, the Italian Communist Party or its successor did take over Italy and it was a catastrophe.  They made a total mess of it, and it lasted, more or less, four or five years, and they were gone, humiliated, laughing stocks and so forth, and really not return again, at least in that form, speaking that way.  The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt lasted one year, and it produced not the total takeover of Egypt that all the experts told us was going to happen.  It produced, according to the BBC, the biggest demonstration in the history of the world, which is quite a statement, right?  And the aerial pictures of it were really quite spectacular.  Okay, so they failed, and they failed in the biggest way possible, and now, they&#8217;re getting purged in Egypt.  They&#8217;re getting thrown out and in prisons and executed and all of that.  It&#8217;s a miracle, you may say.</p>
<p>Well, the Arab Spring, after all, started in Tunisia, and they took over in Tunisia, the Muslim radicals.  And the leaders of Tunisia would tell their Western friends forget it, it&#8217;s over for at least a generation.  You&#8217;ll hear that phrase a lot, at least a generation.  They have failed.  Tunisia now has a largely secular constitution.  They have largely free elections.  They have women increasing their influence, power and prestige in Tunisian society.  Things are improving, et cetera.  Things are improving.  They have not succeeded.  My favorite line in the history of military history, and I hope Victor will agree, was Moshe Dayan at the end of the Six-Day War was interviewed by a bunch of very enthusiastic journalists, and they said well, how great is the IDF?  How wonderful is the Israeli military?  How does it compare with the great armies of history, with Alexander, with Caesar, with Patton?  And Dayan said, &#8220;Nobody knows, we only fight Arabs.&#8221;  Which you can&#8217;t say anymore.  Right?  But he said that.  And so, the bottom line, it pays to be lucky about your choice of enemies, and our enemies are, by and large, incompetent.</p>
<p>Look at Iran.  Iran is a completely wrecked society.  It&#8217;s got the highest per capita level of drug addiction in the world.  It has the biggest drop in the history of birth rate in the history of birth rates. Right?  Nothing like it has ever happened.  It went from, what, nearly eight in the days of the shah to under two.  It&#8217;s under replacement now today under the mullahs.  It&#8217;s a failed society.  In fact, one is tempted to say that Muslim civilization is a failed civilization, but it verges on that.  I don&#8217;t believe that, but it&#8217;s close to it, and in many places, they have a lot of failed states.</p>
<p>So, these are our big enemies, and back when I was in the government, I used to tell people when we assess the strength of our enemies, Soviet Union and so forth, I said you have to calculate the screw-up factor.  That&#8217;s central to dealing with evil.  How good are they?  How effective are they?  How coherent are they?  How well do they lead?  What kinds of decisions do they make?  And the great thing about Gorbachev, when the Soviet Union was headed into history&#8217;s dustbin, was that he made consistently terrible decisions.  Well, our enemies all over the world make a lot of very bad decisions.  They&#8217;ve ruined places, and we are facing a global alliance that runs from North Korea, which is the quintessential failed state, all the way across the world to Vya, China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Nicaragua, Cuba and so forth.  And as you list all these places, they are all pretty much failures.  People don&#8217;t like them.  They&#8217;re ready to be had, and their leaders all know that their people hate them, and they know that their greatest threat and their greatest enemies come from inside, from their own people and so forth.</p>
<p>And what must drive Obama crazy is that hard as he tries to support our enemies and to give them hope, and hard as he tries to demoralize and weaken our allies and would-be allies, the damn people in those enemy countries keep on causing trouble for the leaders and the tyrants.  And we are now in a phase really quite amazing where it doesn&#8217;t seem to matter how many of them the tyrants kill, the people have decided that they don&#8217;t care, and that, I would say, is the single most amazing development in recent history.  I never would have expected.  I don&#8217;t know about you, but I never expected that the Syrian opposition, those people who started and broke with us, the Free Syrian Army and started fighting against the regime, I never though they would resist six months if they didn&#8217;t get outside help, if they didn&#8217;t get real help.</p>
<p>Well, they didn&#8217;t get real help, and they&#8217;re still fighting, and it&#8217;s four years.  And the Iranian opposition keeps on demonstrating and keeps on sabotaging pipelines and blowing up military bases and so on and even assassinates the occasional Iranian nuclear physicist.  And they won&#8217;t stop, even though they know they&#8217;re getting rounded up and tortured and executed and so on.  They don&#8217;t care.</p>
<p>If we had real news reporting in this country, we would see that today, the demonstrations in Venezuela, in downtown Caracas, are as big as the demonstrations were in Ukraine and Maidan just before the fall of Yanukovych.  People aren&#8217;t told that, but that&#8217;s going on, and that&#8217;s been going on for many weeks, and they keep showing up, just as they did in Ukraine.  What&#8217;s going on?  Well, I don&#8217;t know exactly.  Gordon will explain it to us.</p>
<p>Because the Chinese have my favorite theory of history.  The Chinese argue, one school of Chinese historians anyway, argues that the way to understand what&#8217;s going on in our world is not by a series of causally linked events, which is the way we look at it.  Something happens, this leads to something else and so on.  No.  They believe that the best way to understand our world is to look at the unique characteristics that define this moment, and that enables us to see exactly what&#8217;s going on.  Well, of course.  What do you expect from people who give you year of the serpent, year of the dragon, year of the tiger and so on?</p>
<p>So, we&#8217;re in the era of who knows what.  We don&#8217;t know how it&#8217;s all going to turn out, but one thing that we can say – and remember that I started by saying we all know the bad news.  So, I&#8217;m not denying the bad news.  I&#8217;m not saying that everything is wonderful.  I am saying that if you look at this world from the standpoint of our enemies, it doesn&#8217;t really look good at all, and they&#8217;re right to be worried, and Obama&#8217;s right to be frustrated.  Thanks.</p>
<p><strong>Bruce Thornton:</strong> I&#8217;m going to talk about European foreign policy, but I want to do so from a broader philosophical perspective because every policy, including foreign policy, is the result of an idea.  And our foreign policy under Obama, as Michael said, is a result of bad ideas.  So, I&#8217;m going to run through that very quickly.  And this started really to gel and become apparent in the &#8217;90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and you may recognize some of these clichés that were coming from Europe about foreign policy.</p>
<p>One was Kantian, all right?  This is a Kantian foreign policy. Immanuel Kant in 1795 wrote an essay called Perpetual Peace, in which he envisioned a confederation of democratic states that would eliminate war because since they all had the same interest, they could create institutions that would adjudicate conflict, and we&#8217;d go beyond war.</p>
<p>Postmodern.  Any time anybody starts using the word postmodern, grab your wallet &#8217;cause something bad&#8217;s going to happen.  What this meant really was, Europeans, we have progressed beyond national ethnic loyalties and identities.  Those are religion, it&#8217;s tradition and other superstitions that are not modern, and we can transcend that into a global sort of international community.</p>
<p>You also heard a lot multipolar.  There used to be a bipolar world in the Cold War.  Now, it&#8217;s multipolar, and this was all just envy and dislike of the United States, right?  But there&#8217;s not going to be one hegemon that everybody&#8217;s going to be involved in running the world.</p>
<p>Another one this administration particularly likes, soft power and smart power.  Oh, we don&#8217;t need cruise missiles and battleships, et cetera.  We have culture.  We have cuisine.  We have the example of our tolerant societies, and the rest of the world will see that and admire it, and they&#8217;ll all want to aspire to that.</p>
<p>And all of this was predicated on a very flawed assumption, and that&#8217;s that the human race is progressing to where Europe and the United States is today.  All people have the same goals, the same aspirations, the same values.  They all want peace.  They all want prosperity.  They all want to live with tolerance, diversity as well call it, of religion, et cetera.  And that directed a lot of European foreign policy.  It also created a lot of the transnational institutions in the world today, such as the International Court of Justice, the International Court of Arbitration, the EU Court of Human Rights – and our Supreme Court has a bad habit of citing them as a precedent for how they interpret our Constitution – the Genocide Convention, on top of these sorts of institutions that were created back in the 19th century, such as the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, et cetera.  So, these were the kinds of institutions that were going to run the world, make it orderly, promote peace and prosperity, and Europe is going to take the lead on that.</p>
<p>So, what was wrong with that?  Well, I only have a little bit of time, so I&#8217;m only going to tell you five reasons what&#8217;s wrong with it.</p>
<p>One, there&#8217;s no such thing as the international community.  We say this all the time.  There is no such thing as the international community.  Not by any coherent understanding of the word community, there&#8217;s no such thing as international community.  There is no universal set of goals and principles, et cetera.  Say well, sure there is, everybody wants peace.  Really?  The Arabs don&#8217;t want peace.  All sorts of people don&#8217;t want peace.  If they wanted peace, there wouldn&#8217;t be so much war.  Or they want tolerance.  No, they don&#8217;t.  Or if they do want something like, let&#8217;s say, political freedom, well, everybody wants political freedom.  Sure, but they want a lot of other things at the same time.  They want to be faithful to Allah.  They say well, those contradict.  So what?  That&#8217;s human nature.  It&#8217;s not the rational, coherent world that the West thinks it is.  It&#8217;s a world of conflicting goods and conflicting aims.  So, that&#8217;s No. 1.  We&#8217;re basing the whole foreign policy on something that doesn&#8217;t exist.</p>
<p>Two, what do we have?  We have sovereign nations, and sovereign nations are sovereign because they run their own affairs and they establish their interests and their goods and pursue them by whatever means they feel necessary.  What we can create with sovereign nations are treaties.  All those other things, the U.N., International Court, all of that, that the consequence of treaties.  A nation signs a treaty because the nation thinks it&#8217;s going to advance its interest by signing that treaty.  And when it no longer advances its interest, they can either drop out, they can subvert the treaty, they can do what Russia&#8217;s been doing with the arms control treaty, cheat, lie, right?  A famous person said, &#8220;Treaties are made to be broken.&#8221;  So, those treaties don&#8217;t represent some universal shared values.  They represent a means of pursuing an interest.</p>
<p>Three, its utterly and completely hypocritical.  The West, also including Europe, for all their talk of postmodern Kantian foreign policy, when it gets down to it, they become French and they become German and they become Greek, and they pursue their own interest.  I&#8217;ll give you two quick examples I think are good.</p>
<p>Do you remember in late 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq War and the shameless behavior of the French, who were going around to the non-permanent members of the Security Council, subverting them to vote against the United States?  There was already 11, I believe, U.N. resolutions justifying that, but George Bush thought I&#8217;ve got to be diplomatic, et cetera, I&#8217;ve got to go and get an outlet.  And why did France do that?  In service to the great principles of postmodern foreign policy?  No.  France had long done good business with Saddam Hussein, with his oil and selling him weapons, and as the sanctions were dissolving, they saw the opportunity to do more business.  And they didn&#8217;t want him taken out because it wasn&#8217;t in their interest.  Or think about the financial crisis started in 2008.  Wasn&#8217;t it amazing that the EU suddenly was filled with Germans, who were different from Greeks and had no intention, being thrifty and hardworking as they were, to subsidize the café, Dolce Vita lifestyle on their Euro?  I started to say on their deutschemark, but I just dated myself.  No.  All of a sudden, there are French people, and there are English people, and there are Dutch people, et cetera.  So, it&#8217;s all sort of a smoke and mirrors at one level.</p>
<p>Another one, and we see this in this past administration.  All of this international community, diplomacy, international institutions provides great camouflage for leaders and people who don&#8217;t want to act when they&#8217;re supposed to act.  When they don&#8217;t want to take the risk of military action, they don&#8217;t want to pay for it for political reasons or whatever, what do we do instead?  We have summits and conferences, and we send the secretary of state over to talk to genocidal thugs, like Mahmoud Abbas, and sit down and have photo ops.  And it seems like something&#8217;s being done, but what&#8217;s being done is to provide cover for not doing what needs to be done.  And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s made it dangerous, and we&#8217;ve seen this particularly in the last – that&#8217;s how North Korea got an atom bomb.  That&#8217;s how Iran is going to get nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Finally, all of this sounds great.  Going back to the League of Nations, to the Hague Conventions, all of these, this international law sounds great, but there&#8217;s one important question.  Who enforces it?  Who&#8217;s going to enforce the rules and punish the people that break the rules?  The U.N. has been an utter failure at that, obviously.  Don&#8217;t even go to what happened in Kosovo in the &#8217;90s or in Rwanda because they don&#8217;t have the military resources to do that.</p>
<p>So, it proves the truth of Thomas Hobbes&#8217; adage that &#8220;Covenants without the sword are mere words and will not keep a man safe.&#8221;  If somebody&#8217;s not willing to step forward and say this is the punishment for breaking this treaty, for breaking this international law, and if the other side doesn&#8217;t believe that you will do that, if there&#8217;s not a credible threat of force, they are going to break it.  Why not?  And this is what&#8217;s happening right now with Iran, with the whole Palestinian Arab, and that&#8217;s been going on for 60 years, that whole tragic farce has been going on because nobody believes that somebody&#8217;s going to use mind-concentrating lethal force to get people to think clearly about where their best interests lie.</p>
<p>Now, let me finish by saying what&#8217;s all this got to do with Russia?  You want to understand Russia&#8217;s foreign policy?  It is 19th century.  19th century?  It&#8217;s 5th century B.C.  It&#8217;s the way states have always acted going back to Babylon and Sumer, right?  It is the determination of national interest reflecting values important to those people, that all Slavic peoples, Russians, need to be together, right?  They are a unique people.  They have a unique history.  They have a sense of their destiny and their greatness and how that has been tarnished in recent years.  They are what we call irredentist.  They want to bring those stranded beyond their borders back.  They will use force to do that.  They will use diplomacy to do that.  They will use whatever means possible to achieve the aim, and they have no problem doing that.  And we, on our side, said well, that&#8217;s irrational, and that&#8217;s not forward looking.  That&#8217;s not the future.  That&#8217;s not progress.  You&#8217;re going to regret that.  Victor talked about that this morning.  And right now, it&#8217;s like well, maybe we will, but right now, it looks like a pretty good bet.  We&#8217;ll go ahead and roll the dice and see what you guys do about it.  And they do this because they simply do not believe, any more than the Iranians believe, that the West or the United States is going to unleash a really, really hard lesson about why you shouldn&#8217;t act like this.</p>
<p>Again, it&#8217;s a mistake to say well, but that doesn&#8217;t make sense.  Why do we think that human beings want to make sense or that they&#8217;re rational the way we understand rationalism when five minutes on Wikipedia and world history will show you that it has been dominated by people behaving irrationally and violently.  And that&#8217;s the flaws in human nature that really are where you have to look to understand why people behave the way you do.</p>
<p>So, does it seem like we&#8217;re going to be able to delay Iran until it collapses from the weight of its own dysfunctions that Michael detailed?  Are we going to take that chance?  Are we just going to keep our fingers crossed and wait for it to happen?  Right now, it looks like we are.  Maybe we&#8217;ll get lucky, but maybe we won&#8217;t.  And I don&#8217;t think foreign policy ought to be conducted on the basis of hopes and wishes, and that seems to me what we&#8217;re doing.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Gordon Chang: </strong>Bad things happen when your adversary does not respect you.  Washington has been trying to engage a militant state, and as we do so, we have not been supporting our treaty allies and friends as we promised to do.  And as a result, that militant state now believes that it can intimidate us and do anything.  Anything it wants.</p>
<p>There is something very wrong in Asia at the moment.  What is it?  It is Chinese expansionism.  Beijing leaders believe that the People&#8217;s Republic of China should be larger than it is today, and Chinese flag officers are comfortable in public urging their country to initiate armed conflict to seize territory from neighbors, as one general, Liu Yazhou, did at the beginning of this year.</p>
<p>So, why are the Chinese becoming so hostile?  China, I believe, has just passed an inflection point.  Until recently, everything was going its way.  Now, however, all the problems are catching up with the Chinese state at the same time.  And when we look at these problems, we should start with the motor of China&#8217;s rise, its economy.  We all know that the Chinese economy is slowing, but what is not obvious is that it is slowing so fast that the country could fail.  When we ignore official statistics and look at independent data, we see a country that is growing, but it&#8217;s growing only in the very low single digits.  Yet even if China were growing as fast as it claims, which is 7.7 percent for the last two years, that would be insufficient.  Well, why?  Because of debt, every province in the country is a Greece.  The country is creating debt at an extraordinary pace, 20 to 30 percent a year, in order to keep the economy going.  China is building ghost cities and high-speed rail lines to nowhere by accumulating debt at least two times faster than it&#8217;s growing, perhaps seven times faster.  China is in an impossible situation as arithmetic tells us that there has to be a debt crisis soon.  How soon?  Well, this month, there have been high-profile defaults in China, so the inevitable correction, the debt crisis, could take place this year.</p>
<p>And why are China&#8217;s severe economic problems relevant to us?  Because for three decades, the Communist Party has primarily based its legitimacy on the continual delivery of prosperity.  And without prosperity, the only remaining basis of legitimacy is nationalism.  China&#8217;s militant nationalism is creating friction in an arc of nations, from India in the south to South Korea in the north.</p>
<p>For instance, in the middle of 2012, Chinese vessels first surrounded and then seized Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.  Washington, not wanting to antagonize Beijing and hoping to avoid a confrontation, did nothing to prevent the Chinese from taking the shoal, despite our 1951 defense treaty with Manila.  Well, the Chinese were not satisfied with their seizure.  As soon as the Chinese took Scarborough, they ramped up pressure on Second Thomas Shoal, also in the South China Sea.  Beijing, with its infamous nine-dash line, claims about 80 percent of that international body of water as an internal Chinese lake.</p>
<p>And at the same time, the Chinese are trying to grab the Senkaku Islands from Japan by using forceful tactics, regularly sending its ships into Japanese sovereign waters around those islands and some times flying its planes into Japanese airspace there.  Now, many people ask why should the Japanese care about eight barren outcroppings in the East China Sea?  The answer is the Chinese are acting like classic aggressors.  They were not satisfied with Scarborough, so they ramped up pressure on Second Thomas Shoal and the Senkakus, and they will not be happy if they take the Senkakus.  Already, Chinese policymakers, backed up by state media, are arguing that Beijing should claim Japan&#8217;s Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu chain, as well.</p>
<p>To dominate its periphery, Beijing, in November, declared its East China Sea air defense identification zone.  Now, China&#8217;s declaration of this zone, by itself, is a belligerent act.  The zone not only includes sovereign Japanese airspace, it not only includes South Korean airspace, but it also impinges on notions of freedom of navigation, which Americans have been defending for more than two centuries.</p>
<p>Now, there&#8217;s been a noticeable increase in the tempo of China&#8217;s belligerence during the last year, and this uptick has generally coincided with the elevation in November 2012 of Xi Jinping as China&#8217;s new ruler.  There are two theories what&#8217;s going on.  First, some think that Xi Jinping has quickly consolidated political control and that he really is an ardent nationalist, that he is the one pushing the military to act provocatively.  Second, other people, including me, believe that the political transition has not been completed.  And people who share my view, which I admit is a minority one, are concerns that China&#8217;s flag officers are making their own policies independently of China&#8217;s civilian leaders or are essentially telling the civilians what policies to adopt.</p>
<p>In short, I believe that the People&#8217;s Liberation Army is now the most powerful faction in the Communist Party and that the generals and admirals are calling the tune.  Xi Jinping became China&#8217;s supreme leader because he appealed to all factions, in large part because he didn&#8217;t have a faction of his own.  In other words, he was the least unacceptable choice and because now he still has no faction, he cannot afford to offend the flag officers of the PLA, who, in my view, have been driving this bus for quite some time.</p>
<p>A militant China under the military is lashing out, and that is not a good sign.  My guess is that Chinese leaders, seeing all the problems in their country, believe that the window for them to accomplish their goals is closing, and that&#8217;s why they&#8217;re acting more aggressively.  A turbulent China could lash out and shake the world.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve talked about what is wrong in Beijing.  We should also think about what is wrong in Washington.  Our fundamental mistake is that we fervently believe that if we just try hard enough, the Chinese will have to respond in kind.  This is a product of our thinking that we are people, the Chinese are people.  We respond to gestures of friendship.  They will respond to our friendly gestures.  Unfortunately, they don&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Now, take the dynamic evident in the beginning of 2009 when President Obama took office.  In February of that year, the first month after the inauguration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly announced that we were downgrading our emphasis on human rights in order to continue a dialogue with China.  Now, she intended her words as a signal of cooperation.</p>
<p>Beijing, however, took it as a sign of weakness.  Chinese officials were ecstatic because, in the words of one Beijing analyst, the Chinese leaders thought that Hillary Clinton &#8220;had finally succumbed to the full kowtow.&#8221;  So, in the following months, Beijing leaders pressed what they perceived to be their advantage.  Chinese military planes and naval and civilian craft harassed and interfered with the Impeccable and the Victorious, which are two unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance vessels, in international waters in the South China and the Yellow Seas.  In one of those incidents, the harassment, which was an attempt to sever a towed sonar array from the Impeccable, was so serious that it constituted an attack on an American vessel.  In other words, an act of war.  President Obama and Secretary Clinton issued only mild protests when the smiling Chinese foreign minister showed up in Washington just a few days after those provocative acts.</p>
<p>And then in April, and you won&#8217;t believe this, President Obama sent America&#8217;s top naval officer and a destroyer, the Fitzgerald, to China to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese navy.  Well, that show of friendship proved to be another mistake because in May, the Chinese, again, harassed the Victorious in the Yellow Sea.  But this ever-hopeful administration did not give up.</p>
<p>In November, Jeffrey Bader, who was then on the National Security Council, attempted to flatter the Chinese by making a speech in Washington and saying that there was no issue in the world today that could not be solved without Chinese cooperation.  Beijing, obviously, heard those words as a veto that we had given them on American policies.  They reciprocated by humiliating our president when he went to Beijing later that month for the summit and then, also, the following month in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Summit.</p>
<p>And then, in the first months of 2010, Chinese officials and military officers started to make direct threats against the United States in public, some of them talking about waging war against the U.S.  And those belligerent comments have continued to today.  Just in October, Chinese state media, without provocation, bragged about how Chinese submarines could launch nuclear-tip ballistic missiles at the United States and kill tens of millions of Americans.</p>
<p>Maintaining feeble policies has consequences.  Today, we are still having trouble calling out the Chinese in public for its hostile actions against us and for its aggression against our treaty allies, neighbors of China and friends in the region.  If we can&#8217;t speak to Beijing clearly, the Chinese will think we&#8217;re afraid of them.  If they think we&#8217;re afraid of them, they will act accordingly.  Asia is aflame and America is besieged because, I repeat, bad things happen when your adversary does not respect you.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> Larry gave me a number of topics to cover, and I&#8217;m going to try and cover all of them, but let me start quickly by saying we&#8217;re all in agreement about this administration, where it&#8217;s going, but it&#8217;s very interesting, to me at least, that the Washington Post – not really the bastion of conservatism – this month would have two pretty glaring editorials written by the editorial board against the Obama administration.</p>
<p>The first one is a – bear with me while I dig it out here – is a foreign policy based on fantasy.  And bear with me.  Well, that was the title of it.  Bear with me while I read it a little bit, if I may.  &#8220;For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality.  It was a world in which the tide of war is receding&#8221; – those were Obama&#8217;s quotes – &#8220;and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces.  Other leaders in this vision would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world.  Invasions, brute force, great power gains and shifting alliances, those were things of the past.&#8221;  That&#8217;s the Washington Post.  Quite interesting.</p>
<p>They followed up less than a week later with an editorial titled A Defense Budget Based On Hope, and they concluded that article with &#8220;In sum, the new defense budget is a patch constructed on the hope that funding needed to sustain even this administration&#8217;s constrained strategic objectives can be found in future years, looking for money in the out years.  And what if Mr. Obama is wrong and the United States is forced into a large land operation in Syria, Iran, Korea or maybe Eastern Europe?  The chances might be small, but if the worst occurs, the United States will not be ready.&#8221; To me, to hear that, I live in Washington.  To see that come out of the Washington Post gives a dramatic indicator that even some people on the left understand this trouble&#8217;s in country now.  Are their editorials going to change everybody votes?  Probably not, but at least they&#8217;re paying attention and may make other people to think a little bit more.</p>
<p>Larry asked me to talk about military and budget a little bit.  One of the issues was military readiness.  Our readiness is in bad shape right now.  Does that mean we couldn&#8217;t conduct a war?</p>
<p>No, but there have been people on TV within the last month, credible people, saying we only have one combat brigade in the Army that&#8217;s really fully combat ready right now.  One combat brigade?  That&#8217;s not very much.</p>
<p>I think our strength in military readiness is our officers, our young officers and our staff NCOs who are combat trained.  I made many trips to Iraq during the war.  I&#8217;ve been to Iraq 13 times since U.S. forces pulled out, but I have to say in my trips to Iraq, I talked to hundreds of young men and women.  I&#8217;m a Vietnam veteran.  I remember the morale, the charge, the go get &#8216;em, the patriotism of our Vietnam vets.  There were a lot of guys that didn&#8217;t have it.  They didn&#8217;t want to be there, and they always exhibited it, either in garrison or in combat.  In contrast, in Iraq, every last young man and woman I spoke to, hundreds and hundreds of them, had a good attitude.  I saw some who had just gotten there a few days before on their second or third tour.  They were totally committed to what they were doing and convinced me that the strength of our military is in our young men and women.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s in the strength of our military leadership these days.  I&#8217;ll try not to be too critical of them, but I am, as I know some other people are.  We have terrible failures in senior ranks of military leadership.  Some of them, if they had any character at all, would have resigned a long time ago as this administration – incidentally, none of them did resign, but they should have if they had any character to stand up and oppose some of the things that this administration, the great social experiment, the U.S. military, has pushed down on them.  But our young men and women, our young officers, our young staff NCOs, our young troops, they are unbearable.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll tell a quick story without taking too much time.  I was in Sadr City during the height of the worst part of the fighting in Iraq.  Sadr City, as you all may know, was where Muqtada al-Sadr, his people were.  This was totally a Shiite area, very dangerous and in the middle of this area was a battalion from the 82nd.  My son, incidentally, is on his fifth tour overseas right now.  82nd was in this building.  I was in the Marine compound in Beirut a number of times before it was blown.  When I was in this building in Sadr City, it reminded me totally of the building that went down in Beirut.  And here we saw a reenlistment ceremony, and here was a young soldier who was there for his second Thanksgiving.  We were there Thanksgiving Day.  He was there for his second Thanksgiving.  He knew he was going to be there over Christmas, which meant his second Christmas.  His squad had lost five squad mates that week, killed or wounded in an attack in Sadr City, and he was standing there reenlisting.  It can&#8217;t get any better than that when you see young men going through all the things that he had gone through, and his devotion and dedication to his unit and to his country was to stand there and reenlist, knowing that he&#8217;d be back many times.  I saw that so many times over.  So, our strength of our military is our military readiness, our young men and women right now who are committed to do things.</p>
<p>Now, strategy.  And, again, I&#8217;m going back to the list that Larry gave me.  We have a national security strategy that the White House comes out with that kind of lets Congress know what the White House, what the executive plans to do.  The last one came out in 2010, and in it, in the national security strategy, the words – let me look for the right words, again.  I don&#8217;t like to say things.  Susan Rice said that it was going to be a dramatic departure from previous national security strategies.  The strategy advocated increased engagement with Russia, China and India, and you&#8217;ve heard some of that from our other guests here, and it also identified nuclear nonproliferation and climate change as priorities.  Now, nuclear nonproliferation, okay, we can understand, but, indeed, we&#8217;ve seen that dramatic shift.  We&#8217;ve seen it play out over the last few years.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to go back quickly to say that when I talk about the budget issues and we talk about the national strategy, the foreign policy, they&#8217;re a convergence of things that can be shifted and changed a little bit.  We can always play with the budgets.  We&#8217;ve heard all the talk here about how budgets are decreasing.  In fact, they&#8217;re not decreasing.  The growth is decreasing.  The budgets are staying fairly level and going up a little bit.  The administration is hoping for some extra monies in the out years, but even at that growth, that growth can&#8217;t keep up with our military the way it&#8217;s currently configured.  And I&#8217;m sure all of you have heard about how the troop strength is going to go down, how we&#8217;re cutting Navy ships, we&#8217;re cutting Air Force programs.  We&#8217;re really downgrading the ability of the military to conduct the kinds of operations abroad that we might have to do, not that we know we&#8217;re going to do but we might have to do.</p>
<p>Does all of this matter?  Well, budgets come and go.  Budgets can be changed.  Things can be altered quickly.  We can&#8217;t ramp up our manufacturing process, but we can do things that change the budget, that bring more people in, that give the troops the kind of benefits.  But our national security strategy?  Our foreign policy?  Those things don&#8217;t change on a dime.  We are setting in place, through the Obama administration, a foreign policy that we&#8217;re going to have to live with for a long time.  Putin&#8217;s not going to change his mind tomorrow because we change ours a little bit, nor are the Chinese and all the things that they&#8217;re doing.  So, we are living with what we have, and we have to find a way to do it.</p>
<p>Remember, listening to Glenn Beck last night, the Chinese, they used to say, and perhaps they still do, Lord knows, the Chinese used to be operating under Mao on a thousand-year plan.  The thousand-year plan, that was one of their phrases out there.  They looked out a thousand words and say how do we achieve the objective at the end of a thousand years?  Look at Putin.  He&#8217;s operating on whatever the years are that he&#8217;s going to maintain power over there, and he probably expects to be there for a long, long time.  He&#8217;s on the whatever-year-it-is year plan.  Here, in the United States, we&#8217;re on the four-year plan, and if a president gets reelected, we&#8217;re on an eight-year plan, but the fact of the matter is we don&#8217;t have the ability within our structure to take the long-term look, decide what our long-term objectives are, decide how we&#8217;re going to get there, what resources it&#8217;s going to take and get on that path and stay there.  We change it, and we&#8217;ve certainly see how Obama can change things when he gets there.</p>
<p>Quickly, I&#8217;ve been to Egypt once in the last few months, and I find it so interesting that in Egypt, where there were about 26 million people that voted after Mubarak, who, incidentally, as all of you know, did everything we ever asked him to do.  Was he the perfect leader?  No, but he was our leader, and then peace in the Middle East and the relationship, the security and safety of Israel in large part was because of Mubarak.  And we had no problem, this administration, no problem in making sure that he was ousted.  We had no problem in helping the Muslim Brotherhood gain power.  Morsi was elected, 26 million voted out there.  They had more voters could&#8217;ve voted, 26 million voted.  About 13.2 million people voted for Morsi, and by the time he had been in power for about nine months, the same students – and I met with these students on my trip – the same students, different groups, activists, went back, had been going to back to social media, which they used to oust Mubarak.</p>
<p>They went back and social media, through their words, got 22 million people to sign a petition for the ouster of Morsi, asking him to step aside or have a referendum to show that really the country is behind you.  He refused to do it.  He consistently refused to do it.  And when 33 million people went to the streets to actively protest against him and violence erupted, thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood, the police and the military, although it&#8217;s always characterized as only the military, stepped in, arrested him, handed the government reigns over immediately to an interim president, immediately put together a constitutional committee to write a new constitution and went through the process of reforming a government that was all inclusive.  Incidentally, the Muslim Brotherhood was asked to participate in rewriting the constitution, and they refused to do it.</p>
<p>Now, when we met with the student leaders over there, who weren&#8217;t necessarily in favor of anybody, but they were in favor of democracy, they said they felt that they had an ample opportunity to get their feelings before the constitutional committee that was writing the new constitution.  So, in terms, generally speaking, of democracy, the ability of people to get in what they want to say, they felt they were being represented.</p>
<p>Against that backdrop, this administration continues to coddle the Muslim Brotherhood, to refuse to give the necessary military aid that Egypt is asking for, most recently, the Apache attack helicopters, which Israel has encouraged the administration to give to the Egyptians.  We met with General Morsi.  I asked Morsi about the relationship with Israel.  He said, &#8220;Our relationship with Israel is better than ever.  We are working behind the scenes, our intelligence service and their intelligence service, to undo what the Muslim Brotherhood allowed to happen with respect to the Sinai and the ability of weapons to be snuck in to Gaza.&#8221;  He said, &#8220;Our relationship is as good as it goes.&#8221;  I said, &#8220;What about the Suez Canal?&#8221;  He said, &#8220;The Suez Canal is our No. 1 priority.  The Suez has to be secure for international shipping.&#8221;  The guy is saying all the right things, I think.  By virtue of Israel standing up and saying please give them those Apache helicopters, the Israelis would certainly agree on some level.  And against that backdrop, this administration, coddled by the Muslim Brotherhood – and I hope those of you who pay some attention realize that the Muslim Brotherhood is thick in Washington, D.C., thick in politics, thick in this administration, unfortunately thick in the previous administration.  They present a real, viable and visible threat to all of us, and they get very little attention in the media for the threats that they pose.</p>
<p>I also – and I asked Gordon about this – I went to India a couple months ago.  I&#8217;m going to go back.  And before going to India, my first trip, I hadn&#8217;t thought an awful lot about India as the counterbalance to China.  And I don&#8217;t think this administration thinks about India as the counterbalance to China, and as Gordon just pointed out to us, China is a threat.  It&#8217;s always been a threat as far as I&#8217;m concerned and I know as far as he&#8217;s concerned.  And why this administration or certainly the next administration isn&#8217;t reaching out, we need to be.  We need to actively engage with India because the more we engage with others to take the pressure off of us, the more we can concentrate on things that are important to us here in this country.</p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll add one final thing, if I could.  We&#8217;ve seen with all these the Arab Spring, revolutions, Ukraine, what have you, social media is the key.  I wish, and I know others that I&#8217;ve spoken to in the Tea Party wish, that the social media here in the United States could stand up and we could oust this guy, just like they ousted Morsi, in a peaceful revolution in the streets.</p>
<p>Anyway, just my thoughts.  The IRS has already come after me two times on the basis of things that I&#8217;ve said on Fox, so.</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> What is, in your opinion, each of you, an appropriate balance between prudential concerns, not all war all the time everywhere – we don&#8217;t have the money or the will – and a deterrent resolved U.S. national security posture?  How do you analyze the conservative piece of the puzzle?  Hopefully, a 3:00 a.m. wakeup call will be answered at some point in our republic&#8217;s future by a conservative, not a leftist.</p>
<p><strong>Bruce Thornton:</strong> Well, personally, I&#8217;m isolationist because of the way I grew up out in the country where we were isolated, and we liked it that way.  And at night, we locked the gate and loaded the gun, and that was fine.  So, my inclination is towards the hell with the world.  Unfortunately, the world has developed an interconnected global trade that only functions if there is somebody who enforces the rules, somebody who keeps, for example, the Persian Gulf open to oil shipments.  We don&#8217;t depend on it that much, but Europe does.  If it&#8217;s not us, who?  If it&#8217;s not the Sixth Fleet, who&#8217;s going to do that?  And if that global trade doesn&#8217;t function, our economy isn&#8217;t as strong, and it&#8217;s not as productive, and we don&#8217;t have as many jobs.  That&#8217;s just the reality.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think we chose that role, but this is where history has put us, and I think we have to shoulder that responsibility because we are the pretty much only power that could be trusted with that responsibility because we&#8217;re not going to use it annex territory, to create colonies.  Whatever our bad behavior has been, when you compare it historically to other great powers, it&#8217;s been exemplary.  And if we do not fulfill that role, a vacuum will be created, and then there will be all kinds of nations that we don&#8217;t want trusted with that power who are going to compete for that role, and it will be a much, much more disorderly world than it is today.</p>
<p>So, like it or not, we have to engage and we have to be engaged because we&#8217;re the indispensable nation.</p>
<p><strong>Gordon Chang: </strong>We&#8217;re in a stage where, whether we like it or not, the international system is changing.  There may be no international community, but there certainly is an international system, and what we have right now are two very large authoritarian states that are working much closer together than they have in the past.  Many people say China and Russia because of historical antagonisms will never form a durable partnership, but what we have seen, especially since 2001, is that they are, in fact, doing it.  They&#8217;re doing it on many levels, economic, geopolitical, diplomatic.  They are supporting a range of actors in the international system that do threaten what some people call the international community.  Clearly, they&#8217;re supporting Syria, they&#8217;re supporting Iran, North Korea and some of the worst actors elsewhere.</p>
<p>So, I know that it&#8217;s something that is really out of step with the times, but, nonetheless, we do face what could very well be an existential challenge.  We have seen this in many periods in last couple hundred years where the international system changes, where there is this chaos and turbulence that is very difficult to understand at the time, but clearly, right now, we have China and Russia willing to take territory from their neighbors, and if the western democracies do not respond, as difficult as it may be for them, then we will find a replay of the 1930s when the western democracies were not united and eventually were pushed against the wall and ended up in a conflict that cost 75 million lives.  Today, the most destructive weapons in the world are more widely dispersed than they were in 1945.  And so, if we just get by with 75 million lives, we very well may be lucky.  That&#8217;s how bad I believe the situation is right now.</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> Well, just quickly, it&#8217;s a peace-through-strength thing.  And walk softly and carry a big stick.  We need to have a strong military.  We don&#8217;t have to use it all the time, but what happened in Crimea is a good example.  If Barack Obama, in my judgment, had the first day sent some ships into the region, a reminder to Putin that we are a military force and put some troops into the Ukraine to do some training, put some equipment in, as Dr. Hanson said this morning, the very first day, we should&#8217;ve just said we&#8217;re going back to talk to the Poles and Czechs about putting in the missile defense shield, all the things we could&#8217;ve done to at least demonstrate that we are a world power.  But I think it&#8217;s arguable whether or not we are a world power, not on the basis of our military capabilities but on the basis of our leadership or lack thereof.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Ledeen: </strong>I just quickly want to point out that this question is invariably posed in terms of economic or military power.  Should we get economically militarily engaged against our enemies, would-be enemies and so forth?  Our greatest weapon is political.  If you read your Machiavelli, you will find, contrary to what an awful lot of intellectuals say, tyranny is the most unstable form of government.  The most stable form of government is ours.  No system of government in the world has lasted as long as ours in the modern world, and it is our existence that threatens these tyrannies.  It&#8217;s not our action.  And so, they&#8217;re compelled to come after us, and our example is what threatens them most and undermines them.  I think that we are morally and strategically obliged to help the internal enemies in hostile tyrannies, and so, I think that we should be supporting the Iranian people against the mullahs, the Venezuelan people against the Chavez and Maduro regime, the Russian people, the 50,000 who turned out to demonstrate against Putin the other day.  We should have been supporting the people in Maidan and Kiev and so forth.  And we don&#8217;t do that, and the longer we fail to do that, the stronger and more aggressive our enemies become, and the more likely it is that we&#8217;re going to be thrown back on the use of military power, which, as we all know, is now shrinking deliberately.  So.</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> May I add quickly, if I could?  Following up on what Michael just said, that&#8217;s where social media comes in.  We should have a policy in the U.S. government of engaging with countries where the population is trying to make a change that we support.  We ought to have a policy of money, equipment, training, what have you to get the social media activists up and moving and working in a direction.  We can do that.  Doesn&#8217;t cost us any money militarily, doesn&#8217;t put any of our forces at harm but makes an impact on the country we&#8217;re trying to do things with.</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> One question, maybe, for Michael.  What is the status of Voice of America supporting the dissidents in Iran, diplomatic and political strategies to support dissidents?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Ledeen:</strong> Oh, Voice of America, more often than not, supports the regime in Iran and criticizes any American president who is critical of Homani or Rouhani or so forth.  Voice of America is largely run by Iranian immigrants to the United States, most of whom have family back in Iran and are terribly vulnerable to pressure from Tehran, and a lot of the stuff that goes on VOA, especially their TV, which is the biggest part of our broadcast, and it used to be radio, now it&#8217;s TV, would shock you if you saw it.  It&#8217;s just shockingly proIranian and anti-American.  I remember a Bush state-of-the-union speech, and the next morning, the VOA was on the air just condemning every aspect of it, attacking it because it was so anti-Iranian and so on.  Now, VOA, see, if it were my VOA, I would fire all the Iranians and let Americans run VOA.  I think it&#8217;s crazy.  These people are uniquely subject to pressure, and the whole Iranian-American community is heavily infiltrated by Iran, just as captive nations people, Cubans, et cetera, were heavily infiltrated by the Soviet intelligent services and so forth during the Cold War.  So, that&#8217;s normal.  You should expect that.</p>
<p>So, you have to have Americans do this stuff, and we will invariably come back to the basic problem we&#8217;re all facing, which is we have a failed educational system that raises children to be anti-American and to blame America for the world&#8217;s problems, and I don&#8217;t think that we should be surprised that we&#8217;re getting people like Obama and Valerie Jarrett and Hillary and so forth in high positions of government.  They are products of those schools.  That is what we should expect.  We should expect leaders with those views because that&#8217;s what they&#8217;ve been trained to think that over the journalists.  We complain about journalists all the time.  They go to the same schools.  They don&#8217;t know anything about anything in the world.</p>
<p>What was it?  A few years ago, they did a poll of students at the University of Texas, and half of them didn&#8217;t know what country was to the south of them.  Well, Americans have always been bad at geography, but we&#8217;re reaching new limits right now.</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> A tease for later, I see the great Caroline Glick is here, somebody who knows how to fight in the world of ideas and propaganda.  So, that&#8217;s a foreign policy genius.  Yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> My question is for the lieutenant colonel, and I&#8217;ve been reading a lot on the Internet about the purging of the upper levels of the military.  Could you please comment about that?</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> Thank you for asking me that question.  I get asked it fairly often.  Some of those people who were put out of the military were put out for legitimate reasons, misconduct of some sort.  The list is pretty big.  Some were put out because it was time for them to retire.  Carter Ham&#8217;s a good example.  There&#8217;s always been accusations that Carter Ham was fired.  No, Carter Ham, his time was up.  He might&#8217;ve left a month or two early.  But the reality is, I have a friend – I don&#8217;t have much association with the Pentagon – I have a very good friend who retired, a two-star general, who has a lot of friends inside the Pentagon, and they have told him – he told me this last month – they&#8217;ve told him that whereas in the old days you could sit around with your colleagues and complain about policy or the White House or this or that somewhere else, these days, you say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person, and you are out.  You are out.</p>
<p>So, I believe, indeed, that there are people in that list that you&#8217;ve seen who went out because of something they said, and again, the despicable military leadership that we have right now, they&#8217;re representative of the problem.  The other part of that problem is those are the guys, the guys in there now, are the ones that are going to select the ones that replace them.  So, we&#8217;re going to see this cascading effect of getting people in there who are really butt boys – excuse my language – to the White House.  And that&#8217;s why we need people like Congressman Gohmert back there and members of Congress to get in there and clean that place out.  Excuse my language.</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> It is a little disheartening you may have a 30- or 40-year career after your military service as a flag officer.  There&#8217;s a lot at stake, a lot of pensions, a lot of glory, a lot of glamour.  It&#8217;s not the same senior leadership of the military we used to have.  Yes, sir?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> You guys were talking about social media.  A week before last, I read on Drudge that what&#8217;s the Internet, we&#8217;re giving up the Internet?  I haven&#8217;t heard that at all since I&#8217;ve been here.  I know this might be a strange panel to ask, but I have not heard it mentioned once today, and it sounds fairly important.</p>
<p><strong>Bruce Thornton:</strong> Well, it&#8217;s another example of what I was talking about.  It&#8217;s the idea that we&#8217;re not worthy.  We shouldn&#8217;t hog it all up.  We&#8217;re probably unsavory for our alleged historical crimes and then we should open this up and let all the whole world get in.  But, of course, all we&#8217;re going to do is allow more censorship by nations like China, who will get on whatever or have their minions on whatever ends up taking the place, and it&#8217;ll just be another might as well hand it over the U.N.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Bill, this is for you.  You were talking earlier about what&#8217;s happening over at the Department of Defense with the flag officers, and my question sort of goes back then to Petraeus and what happened to him during the Benghazi hearings and when he knew that this video was not the cause of what happened over there, why in his testimony before the congressional committee he, in fact, said that&#8217;s what had happened?  Now, was it the Paula situation?  Were they holding something over his head?  At that particular point, his honor and his duty should have been, maybe just to say that doesn&#8217;t matter.  I don&#8217;t understand why he did that.</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> I think, unfortunately, that anybody in government these days, if they want to keep their job, and they all do, is going to say whatever they&#8217;re told to do.  And irrespective of whether it&#8217;s the truth or not, they&#8217;re going to walk in there and they&#8217;re going to say what it is that is expected of them to be said.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> But these were military.  These were people that he had –</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> Should have been a totally principled man, and I think, again, by the time people get to a certain rank or level – you know what?  George Bush did a terrible thing, in my judgment, when he made Colin Powell the secretary of state.  For a number of reasons, not the least of which – I&#8217;ve got plenty of criticisms of Colin Powell, but here was the real problem.  The problem is they told every four-star general that there&#8217;s something beyond four stars if you do it right.</p>
<p>And so, they all go up there now getting their four stars, thinking well, when I&#8217;m all done here, I can be the secretary of something or the director of the CIA or something else.  This is the ambition-driven people that want more and more and more, and then because of that, a lot of people who may otherwise stand up and say this is – there&#8217;s a rumor floating around about three weeks ago that one of the members of the joint chiefs was going to resign.  A service chief was going to resign because with the new budget.  Well, it hasn&#8217;t happened because he probably reflected well, wait a minute, why would I want to resign when I can be the secretary of whatever?  It&#8217;s a sad situation, and Phyllis, you know somebody who I know who probably has more insight into all of this than I do, incidentally, one of the most principled people.  I served with this guy, a friend of Phyllis&#8217;, Bill Garrison, who was one of the commanders of Delta Force at one time.  I served with him at a very, very highly classified unit, clandestine unit.  Finest military guy ever had who was the commander of all the U.S. forces in Somalia, who ended up being pushed out of the military because he was honest.  Was totally honest with Congress and in the letter he wrote on paper and he paid for it with his career, which is one of the reasons why he&#8217;s probably the finest person I ever served with.  You like serving with admirable, honest men or women of character, and some times it&#8217;s hard to find them these days.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why I always say, if I can say real quickly, when we talk about having a panel that wants to talk about defense budgets or changes in the military, whatever, you don&#8217;t want to have generals on that.  You want to have the sergeant majors.  If I wanted to know how the staff in the Pentagon ought to be dramatically reduced, which would be a good idea, we want to save some money, I&#8217;m not calling in the generals and service Gs.  I want a bunch of sergeant majors.  They tell the truth.  Sergeant major, what do you think we ought to do?  Well, let me tell you, colonel.  And they do.  And that where we ought to get a lot of our decisions driven by those guys.</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> So, we come to our last two standing questioners.  Can I take both questions at the same time?  Sir? Okay.  We have, I understand, an active-duty captain in the U.S. Marine Corps.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> So, I think everyone in this room would agree that a lot of the disintegrating international situation we see is because of an absence of leadership, but I think good leadership is not just the posture you present to the world or even the strength of your military.  It&#8217;s a vision you have for what the world should look like 10, 20 years from now.  Ronald Reagan built up the military, but he also had a vision for a world without the Soviet Union.  So, in the panel&#8217;s opinion, what would a good vision be for the world 10, 20 years from now, considering the threats on the horizon, cyber warfare, transnational terror networks.  What should America be promoting and bringing the world towards, as opposed to just posturing in the world?</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> Thank you for that.  I&#8217;ll take the last question, as well.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Got to move the mic here a little bit.  Listen, I wrote a few things, but I&#8217;m not even going to go there.  I think he just covered a bunch of what I kind of wanted to say, as well.  Ultimately, let me ask this question to you all, and I want to say to everybody in here, understand what the power of social media can do.  If you don&#8217;t know how to use it, get someone to show you because it&#8217;s the voice that we need to express.  I just wanted to say to you all what do you think we can do as patriots – this is part of the military that no one talks about.  The patriots in this room, what can we do to offset some of the treason-type mentality that we see in our military leaders today?  What can we do to make an impact on the direction of our military and our national forces today?</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> So, why don&#8217;t we just go down the panel.  A question about a call for vision and a call for action.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Ledeen:</strong> First obligation is to defeat the leftist jihadi alliance, which is waging war against us.  And that starts with a recognition that we&#8217;re at war.  We&#8217;re not responding, and so you have to go after them.  Jihadis and leftists share this kind of messianic vision whereby every time they win something, they proclaim to their followers and to those people who are in the middle you see, history&#8217;s on our side or Allah&#8217;s on our side, that&#8217;s why we win and that&#8217;s why our opponents lose.  So, that kind of movement is particularly vulnerable to being unraveled by defeat.  Defeat does terrible things to messianic movements because it enables us to ask them well, if back when you were winning, that was because Allah was on your side or history was on your side, how do you explain it when you&#8217;re defeated in Iraq or when the Muslim Brotherhood&#8217;s thrown out of Egypt and so on?  What&#8217;s up with that?  Has Allah changed his mind?  Has history suddenly changed course?  What&#8217;s going on?  So, we have to beat them, and they&#8217;re beatable.  They&#8217;re not particularly tough enemies I have to say.</p>
<p>So, the first thing is to win that war, beat them, and the second thing is to what end?  Well, to the end of advancing American objectives, and the basic American objective is democratic revolution.  That&#8217;s what we are.  We are the only truly revolutionary country in the world, and we have to advance democratic revolution.  That&#8217;s what we stand for.  If we stand for anything, it&#8217;s that.</p>
<p>And so, whenever I hear people talk about the desirability of stability and how bad some event is because it destabilizes something, my teeth get set on edge because we should be opposed to stability.  We don&#8217;t want stability.  One thing that Obama is right about is the importance of change, not just because we want to but also because it&#8217;s the basic rule of life.  Things don&#8217;t remain the same.  Things change all the time.</p>
<p>And then, finally, remember Machiavelli, the great, ignored, greatest political philosopher in history.  Machiavelli&#8217;s basic rule, Machiavelli 101, Line 1, Chapter 1, man is more inclined to do evil than to do good.  Give up all that nonsense about all men are the same and all men are basically good.  They&#8217;re neither.  Men are different, and men are basically evil, and the reason why you need great leaders, great statesmen and great military is because we&#8217;re going to be facing evil men most of the time.</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> So, we got Michael Ledeen to move from his glorious optimism?</p>
<p><strong>Bruce Thornton:</strong> I think the first question, I don&#8217;t like to say what should be our vision.  People with visions is what&#8217;s got us in part of this &#8212; If we just pursue our interests and our security, all will be well.  If we actively do that and follow the advice that Michael just gave, we don&#8217;t really need to have a vision.  Our vision is that we are the best political-social order on history, that we exemplify the possibilities of flawed humans and if we live up to our ideals and support them whenever they are manifested in whatever way is necessary, we&#8217;ll be fine.  And I forget the second because I don&#8217;t want to leave out the –</p>
<p><strong>Larry Greenfield:</strong> Action plan.</p>
<p><strong>Bruce Thornton:</strong> Well, it&#8217;s the same thing, isn&#8217;t it?  The action plan is when we see a truly democratic, all right, not a Potemkin democratic movement, a truly democratic movement that we support it in any possible way and by all the means that have been talked about today.  We don&#8217;t say well, gee, we can&#8217;t say anything about human rights in China because we want to cut some deal with the Chinese and they might get angry.  We have more spine and we are more aggressive and take actions that follow from that.  And when necessary, when our interests and our situations are genuinely threatened, then we take military action.</p>
<p>But let me just make one last point what we&#8217;re talking about here because we always focus on leaders and leadership and we have bad leadership, which we do right now, obviously.  The bottom line, in this country, they&#8217;re all elected into office, and every few years, we have an election that can change the course.  I&#8217;m hoping that this year, there will be an election that changes course and another, but we can&#8217;t let the people off the hook completely for this because if they don&#8217;t want to pay the price, if they don&#8217;t want to take the risk, then the risk isn&#8217;t going to be taken and the price isn&#8217;t going to be paid.  And this was another great political philosopher people need to read, de Tocqueville, talking about American democracy way back in the 1840s, said that democracies are better at domestic crises than foreign policy because foreign policy requires consistency over time, and when you have an election every two years, it&#8217;s very difficult to have that consistency.</p>
<p>So, again, we just can&#8217;t project it out onto some bad leaders and say it&#8217;s their fault and if we change.  I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s that simple.</p>
<p><strong>Gordon Chang:</strong> Yeah, the emphasis on Tocqueville is interesting because only authoritarian states have consistent foreign policies.  But, nonetheless, in this country, in republican administrations and democratic ones, there have been ideologies that have been essentially unshakeable.</p>
<p>So, for instance, in the 1970s, the ideology of the United States was that we were going to have to accept the Soviet Union as a given because the Soviet Union would never fail and that we would always be confronting in some way the Soviet Union, so we might as well be nice to it.  Well, today, that has sort of become different.  It&#8217;s an engagement policy where we take the Chinese state as a given, and the Chinese state, as Michael might appreciate, is actually quite weak from any number of different perspectives.</p>
<p>So, I think the important thing for us to recognize is that our engagement policies today in trying to work with hardline states is absolutely wrong for all the reasons that we just heard from Michael and Bruce.  And it&#8217;s important for us to remember that the engagement policy of today is in substance the same as appeasement was in the 1930s.  We have generous motives.  We have very good visions for what we want to do, but, unfortunately, we have forgotten the ideals that Bruce was talking about because this is absolutely critical.  Because these authoritarian states hate us, not because of who we are but because of what we stand for and that they view us as a threat.  And it&#8217;s unfortunate that most people don&#8217;t understand that, but that&#8217;s they way that China and Russia look at the United States.  And until both Russia and China are real functioning democracies, there will not be peace in the world.</p>
<p><strong>Bill Cowan:</strong> Most of the things we talk about here are, indeed, nation states.  We look at a vision, what would we like the world to be like in 20 or 30 years.  The nation states things will be worked over from all angles, what have you.  To me, I&#8217;m a terrorism guy.  The real issue continues to be all these disparate terrorist cells here and there.  Look what 911, one incident, look what that did to us.  Look how it changed America.  Look at the trillions of dollars.  Look at the bureaucracy.  That one incident because it terrified all of us.  So, to me, the big issue is how do we make things look different in 20 or 30 years with respect, in large part, to terrorist organizations, terrorist entities, mostly Islamists, and we have failed miserably in the Bush administration and his administration.  There are thousands of moderate Muslims out there who don&#8217;t like those radicals any more than we do.  In fact, in Egypt, when we met with businessmen, one of the key businessmen said, &#8220;We have just woke up from our worst nightmare.  We realized who the Muslim Brotherhood is.&#8221;</p>
<p>We, as a nation, the United States, have failed to put together policies and programs that gave voice to the moderates, to those who will go after these radicals in every way, shape and form they can.  And if we want to have some success in the long years, not that we can eradicate all of it, but if we want to have some success, we need to make sure that moderates have a voice that can be heard and can have an impact and start dragging more moderates to the moderate side instead of radicals to the radical side.</p>
<p>Social media, real quickly, Buddy, to go on your question, Buddy&#8217;s from North Carolina.  So is my wife back there.  My wife is a hardcore social media activist.  She and a couple other women get credit for getting the lieutenant governor or North Carolina elected, a conservative republican elected against all odds.  He was not the favorite.  He was at the bottom of the line, and I bet right now, this whole time we&#8217;ve been here, more people in North Carolina know about everything that&#8217;s happened here over the last two days than they do right here in California.  So, social media activism absolutely works.  If you&#8217;re not engaged, if your kids aren&#8217;t engaged, your friends, your neighbors, all those things make a difference.  It&#8217;s not a world I grew up in.  I&#8217;m not even comfortable in it, but it&#8217;s a world that makes a difference, and it&#8217;s shown itself to make a difference around the world.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Environmentalist World War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-environmentalist-world-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-environmentalist-world-war</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-environmentalist-world-war/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2014 04:50:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clean]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[green energy]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How environmentalism causes war with Russia, China and Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/173042068.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221792" alt="173042068" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/173042068-450x255.jpg" width="270" height="153" /></a>The Saudi Monarchy and Putin aren’t afraid of Barack Obama or even of an F-35; they’re afraid of fracking.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia&#8217;s <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/saudi-billionaire-prince-fracking-competitively-threatens-any-oil">Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal</a> said that &#8220;North American shale gas production is an inevitable threat.” <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/26/why-putin-hates-fracking.html">And Putin suddenly turned into an</a> environmentalist when it came to fracking warning that it makes “black stuff comes out of the tap.”</p>
<p>The Russians and the Saudis are both threatened by American energy production for economic reasons and political reasons. America’s import of oil turned Saudi Arabia from a backward country of goat herders not that much more advanced than Afghanistan into a world power whose armies are the legions of Muslim settlers and terrorists spreading across the world.</p>
<p>Without Saudi oil, the Clash of Civilizations with Islam might not even be happening. Energy also allowed Putin to shore up a flailing government and put it back on the path to becoming an expanding empire. But it wasn’t really the KGB oligarchy or the Saudi monarchy that made those things happen.</p>
<p>It was our own environmentalists.</p>
<p>Islam is spreading terror worldwide fueled by oil and dreams of a global Caliphate. Asian countries face a war with China over oil in the South China Sea. Russia is rebuilding the Soviet Union at gunpoint and gaspoint. As Russia, China and Islamic groups gain more confidence; the scale of their conquests will only increase. And all three have become serious threats because of environmentalism.</p>
<p>Environmentalism drove Western nations to export dirty jobs and industries abroad. China gobbled up American manufacturing while Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE took up American energy production.  Putin arrived late to the party, but still managed to do to Europe what the Saudis had done to the US. Europe won’t do anything about Russia’s expansionism because it has come to depend on it.</p>
<p>US imports of crude oil quadrupled between 1970 and 1980 while domestic crude oil production continued to fall. Not that long ago the United States was importing <a href="http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/MT_liquidfuels.cfm">60 percent of its petroleum</a>.  Among other economic and social factors, the rise in crude oil imports aligned neatly with the rise of the environmental movement. By the seventies, environmental fanaticism was written into Federal law.</p>
<p>The Saudi GDP went from 4.2 billion in 1968 to over a hundred billion by 1980 and to over half a trillion today. Some of that money went to yachts, prostitutes and palaces, but much of it went into the expansion of Saudi soft power through international Islamic institutions and equally international terror.</p>
<p>This period would also become known as the dawn of modern international terrorism.</p>
<p>Between 1978 and 1991, the Saudis gave Arafat’s terrorists almost a billion dollars. They couldn’t have been that generous in 1968, but by 1980, they could easily spare the money.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia today is listed as the principal funder of Sunni terrorist groups worldwide, but it started small by funding the PLO, which helped pioneer many of the tactics that groups such as Al Qaeda make use of, before moving on to funding them. Even more significantly, the Saudis helped set up the cultural and political framework for the Islamization of the West.</p>
<p>Putin’s power and threat level likewise grew with the rising tide of environmentalism.  Production of European renewables increased by 70% from 2002 to 2010 while production of crude oil fell 40% and natural gas production fell by 24.9%. The only way to make up the shortfall between Green Energy and real energy without increasing domestic “dirty” energy production was through dirtier foreign imports.</p>
<p>Between 2000 and 2010, the UK went from an energy exporter to an energy importer. Europe went from importing less than half of its natural gas to importing 62 percent of it. While the Russian overall share dropped, the low production rates left Europe more dependent than ever. And the difference was made up by Qatar; another top funder of Islamic terrorism worldwide, responsible for, among other things, the Syrian Civil War.</p>
<p>Reagan had opposed the Trans-Siberian pipeline using everything from sanctions to sabotaged equipment to stop the Soviet Union from gaining energy leverage over Western Europe. His larger solution to the Soviet energy threat however was to rely on the Saudis and now Western Europe, faced with the threat of Putin, is repeating that mistake by turning to Qatar, which has become an even bigger terror state than Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>There is some muted talk about nuclear power, but even though nuclear power has been endorsed by environmentalists from Gaia theorist <a href="http://www.jameslovelock.org/page12.html">James Lovelock</a> to the late <a href="http://atomicinsights.com/nuclear-energy-loses-a-spokesman-paul-newman-dies-at-83/">Paul Newman</a>, the safer political option, is to throw more money at “renewables” while filling energy needs from some convenient enemy state.</p>
<p>The Trans-Siberian pipeline that allows the Greens to play at self-righteous ecology with renewables while their actual needs are taken care of by Russia and Qatar <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1983/10/15/the-bitter-fruits-of-slave-labor/">was built with slave labor</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.Download&amp;FileStore_id=236">The Sakharov Committee&#8217;s hearing</a>, chaired by a former assistant prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials, reported that prisoners in pipeline labor camps went hungry and experienced outbreaks of disease; women were forced to work on the pipeline and were sexually assaulted by guards.</p>
<p>The workers, some of them political dissidents, ate lichens out of hunger. The writer Julia Vosnessenskaya testified that due to the lack of nutrition, &#8220;most of us left the camps infertile.&#8221;</p>
<p>This was the pipeline that Reagan tried to stop, that European countries financed and fought for and are now chained by.  Europe can choose Qatar over Russia, but Qatar also bases its economy on slave labor.</p>
<p>Europe is desperately searching for a moral energy policy, but the only truly moral energy policy is domestic production. Environmentalists have made that impossible by hijacking domestic energy production into the so-called renewables which are expensive, unreliable and whose worthlessness creates a dependency on foreign energy.</p>
<p>And even Green Energy often directly relies on equipment from China or investments from Qatar.</p>
<p>Green Energy only means that actual energy has to come from countries less finicky about pollution and human rights leading to slave labor, repression, terror and war. Environmentalism has brought us to the edge of world war by turning over manufacturing to China and energy to Russia and Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>China and Islam became major threats due to policies that took hold in the sixties and seventies. Russia became a major threat because of policies from the nineties and oughts. It may take a decade for the consequences of environmental policies to begin kicking in, but when they do, they are horrific.</p>
<p>Energy and manufacturing outsourcing don’t make the world cleaner. China and Russia are fantastically dirty. The Gulf War and various other conflicts involving oil countries have spewed more pollution into the atmosphere than all the cars of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Nor can it be said that they make the world a better place when Islam, Russia and China are dragging the world into war.</p>
<p>Green Energy doesn’t lead to energy independence. Instead it puts money into the pockets of tyrants and terrorists. A new century has become clotted with wars because of the environmental activists perversely campaigning for a cleaner world.</p>
<p>Instead of a greener world, they have given us a Green World War.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>What the Post-American World Will Look Like</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/what-the-post-american-world-will-look-like-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-the-post-american-world-will-look-like-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:49:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[demographics]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221410</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[War, chaos and misery.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/6highres_00000401419611.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221411 alignleft" alt="Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in China" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/6highres_00000401419611.jpg" width="268" height="187" /></a>The Cold War map of the world divided into two camps was simple and clear. The post-American world will be a much more ambiguous place. Instead of two global ideological alliances based around two world powers, there will be three post-ideological powers, no longer global in scope, and one worldwide ideological alliance.</span></p>
<p>The United States, Russia and China are post-ideological states. Russia and China have abandoned Communism. The United States is even abandoning nationalism; to say nothing of capitalism, democracy or freedom. Its rulers cling to scraps of global leftist ideology that isolate them from their own people.</p>
<p>Russia, China and the United States are all demographically unstable. Russia and the United States are both on track to majority-minority status. China&#8217;s demographic disaster will be the outcome of its one child policies, gendercide and its war on the countryside. The United States will probably weather its demographic problems better than Russia or China, because the former faces a fatal Muslim demographic takeover and the latter a conflict that will tear it apart, but like Russia and China, the demographic crisis in the United States will be exacerbated by the lack of common bonds to see it through a period of social stress.</p>
<p>There is little to unify Russia or China except greedy oligarchies playing at nationalism. It&#8217;s an unconvincing nationalism because the sons and daughters of their elites spend more time abroad than at home and sometimes even hold American citizenship. The oligarchs of Russia and the princes of China are as globalist as any Eurocrat. They have few national commitments. Their goals are wealth and power for their own families and associates.</p>
<p>Unfortunately there may be even less to unify the United States after the left erodes everything from free speech to the free market. Uncontrolled immigration has imported masses of hostile populations everywhere from Nashville to Minneapolis radically changing quintessentially American cultures and replacing them with balkanized minority coalitions with little in common except a mutual hostility against the United States.</p>
<p>In contrast to the cultural vulnerabilities of the three powers, Islam, the defining global ideological alliance, lacks a superstate as the center of its empire, though it has many state bases, but enjoys the allegiance of a worldwide population larger than any of the three powers. Demographic projections continue to favor the growth of Islam over China, Russia and the United States.</p>
<p>The three powers deal with Muslims by dividing them up into three groups; those that are part of their systems, those that are outside but allied to them, e.g. Syria for Russia, Saudi Arabia for the United States and Pakistan for China, and those that are its separatist or terrorist enemies.</p>
<p>Instead of coming to terms with a global struggle with Islam, each power largely concentrates on fighting Muslim separatist or terrorist groups that destabilize its sphere of influence while arming, funding and supporting those Muslim separatist and terrorist groups that destabilize rival powers.</p>
<p>Muslim terrorists operate in all three powers, but are dismissed as unrepresentative aberrations. That is wishful thinking, but empires are shaped to fight their own kind. Islam, like Communism, is something different. It is an ideology and post-ideological powers who believe in very little are poorly adapted to fighting it. Instead many of their elites secretly admire its dedication.</p>
<p>Islam emerged by taking advantage of the slow collapse of the Roman Empire. Its reemergence as a world power once again coincides with the fall of empires. Like a hyena trotting after prey, Islam is a cultural carrion eater consuming the skills and knowledge of superior civilizations to sustain its warlordism whose religious fanaticism eventually decay into decadent dynasties.</p>
<p>The collapse of the Pax Americana under Obama has freed up Russia and China to begin campaigns of territorial expansionism. Obama&#8217;s failure to deter Russia in Ukraine will encourage China to use force as a solution to territorial disputes in the South China Sea. These events will wake the world from the dream of the Pax Americana in which American power kept the peace in much of the developed world.</p>
<p>Those most immediately affected by the decline of the United States will be the Asian and European countries that outsourced their defense to the United States after WW2.</p>
<p>Europe was able to turn inward without having to make the hard choices and its elites were even able to drag the United States into implementing their vision internationally. But that is coming to an end. Libya may have been the last such war and the American contribution to it was fairly limited.</p>
<p>The nations of Europe suffer from Japanese birth rates, Russian demographics, Chinese corruption and American economics (though it would be more accurate to say that America suffers from EU economics.) Despite its size and population, Europe does not have a bright future.</p>
<p>Russia will not stop with Ukraine and NATO will dissolve, officially or unofficially, but the budding Russian empire will find that fighting a new wave of Muslim insurgencies in formerly peaceful republics will consume too much of its time and energy. The soldiers who will march on the scattered pieces of the old red empire will be Muslims and the Eurasian Union will become a Muslim empire with a handful of churches. Like Rome, its fall will come at the hands of its own barbarians.</p>
<p>Iraq and Afghanistan will not be as psychologically devastating to Americans as Vietnam, but severe military budget cuts and a campaign against the warrior culture will leave the military in no shape for anything except peacekeeping missions.</p>
<p>None of this has to happen, but it will if the same bad decisions continue to be made.</p>
<p>If eight years of Obama are topped by eight years of Hillary; this is where we will end up. If multilateralism continues to be the great obsession of the elites, if bad economics and bad strategy continue destroying nations, if the developed world continues de-industrializing to save the planet while empowering energy tyrannies, then the post-American world will be upon us.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>China and Iran Draw Conclusions on Crimea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/china-and-iran-draw-conclusions-on-crimea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=china-and-iran-draw-conclusions-on-crimea</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:20:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Aggressive powers see an opportunity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/china_iran_flag.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221512" alt="china_iran_flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/china_iran_flag.jpg" width="296" height="197" /></a></span>As Putin moves to consolidate his hold on Crimea, concern grows that Russia’s expansionist appetite will not be satiated with conquest of the peninsula. Ukraine fears that Putin’s next move will entail seizure of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian sentiment remains high. Some news outlets intimated that the tiny nation of Estonia, once part of the Soviet Union <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/19/us-russia-estonia-idUSBREA2I1J620140319">may be next</a> on Russia’s wish list with reports about Russia’s concern over the treatment of ethnic Russians in the Baltic country.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://time.com/13310/clinton-walks-back-russia-nazi-comparison/">she later backtracked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">) and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stephen-harper-john-baird-compare-russia-to-ww-ii-era-germany-1.2559643">compared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Russia’s actions in Crimea with those of Nazi Germany and its unlawful seizure of Sudetenland in 1938, suggesting correctly that aggression unchecked will simply lead to more aggression. While there are certainly similarities between the two scenarios in that the leaders of both nations feigned concern for their kinsmen as the impetus for invading the sovereign territory of another nation, the similarities stop there.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hitler was a madman, prone to irrational and rash decisions. He was infamous for refusing advice offered by seasoned Prussian military officers infinitely more capable than his limited mental abilities. Putin, by contrast is cold, cunning and calculated. An ex-KGB officer, Putin is by definition a cautious, analytical man who does not embark on an endeavor without thinking it through. Hence, when his troops entered Crimea, they did not bear any insignias that would betray their nationality thus gaining a measure of plausible deniability. While a confused NATO was scrambling to react to rapid developments, Putin had already thought things through to the minutest detail.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Putin realizes that any further moves into Ukraine will likely invite biting sanctions and other political repercussions and any move on the Baltic countries will provoke direct confrontation with NATO. Thus, the Ukrainian crisis will end in Crimea and go no further. Putin recognizes that he’s pushed the Crimean envelope as far as it could go and he is satisfied with this result. The aggressor has attained its objective while at the same time exposing and highlighting a feckless American foreign policy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Events in Crimea and the Obama administration’s impotence in dealing with aggression have also had far-reaching, negative global implications. There are two nations watching events unfold with keen interest. China and Iran, two dictatorial countries with imperialistic and expansionist agendas, can draw comfort from a pusillanimous American foreign policy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the South and East China seas, China is aggressively seeking to expand its maritime borders. It has made significant headway in both these areas with a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/02/19/china-preps-military-for-short-sharp-war-with-japan-says-us-navy/">muscular military approach</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> designed to intimidate American regional allies like Japan and the Philippines. America’s feeble response to Putin’s aggression in Crimea will only serve to embolden a resurgent and aggressive China, making the likelihood of a regional war in that neglected theatre a real possibility.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The situation with respect to Iran is even more acute. Iran is arguably the greatest threat to world peace since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, providing financial and military support to groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-sees-new-weapon-in-iraq-iranian-efps/">Iraqi insurgents</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and Hezbollah. Its terror tentacles have extended beyond the Mideast to Europe, South Asia, Africa and the Americas and its </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/24/iranian-sponsored-narco-terrorism-in-venezuela-how-will-maduro-respond">connection to narco-terrorism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is well established.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Israel’s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://defense-update.com/20140305_israel_sizes_shipload_of_heavy_rocket.html">recent naval interception</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of the Klos-C, a terror bound cargo vessel laden with Iranian arms, including some forty, long-range M-302 rockets, only serves to underscore the scheming nature and menace posed by that pariah nation.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But it is Iran’s nuclear ambitions coupled with its aggressive ballistic missile program that are most worrisome, with implications far beyond the region.  Iran is now cognizant of the fact that the Obama administration, exercising what John McCain so aptly described as a “feckless” foreign policy, will do nothing to thwart the Islamic Republic from achieving breakout capacity. Once that occurs, the free world will be at the mercy of an apocalyptic Islamic theocracy and that should be a source of concern for us all.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</b></span></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Report Card For Obama &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/report-card-for-obama-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=report-card-for-obama-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:05:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kai Chen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[language]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Monty Morton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[report card]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221011</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The grades are in for ObamaCare and the administration's handling of the economy and foreign policy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Obama99.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221462" alt="Obama99" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Obama99-450x343.jpg" width="315" height="240" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></p>
<p>This week’s<em> Glazov Gang </em>was joined by <strong> Monty Morton</strong>, a conservative entrepreneur and walking encyclopedia. He produced a <em>Report Card For Obama</em>. Don&#8217;t miss this riveting special episode where brilliant fact-filled analyses are bestowed and surprising grades are given for ObamaCare and the administration&#8217;s handling of the economy and foreign policy:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QV8MNkFpG60" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second BLOCKBUSTER episode with <strong>Kai Chen</strong>, China&#8217;s Basketball Superstar and the author of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Journey-Toward-Freedom/dp/1425985025">One In A Billion: Journey Toward Freedom</a>. </i>He joined the Gang to discuss <em>Self-Denunciation Sessions in Communist China, </em>sharing the price he paid for daring to be an individual.<em> </em></p>
<p>Kai also discussed his journey out of the tyranny of communist China to the liberty of America. <strong>[Make sure to watch his video <a href="http://www.interbasket.net/forums/showthread.php?13004-Chen-Kai-From-basketball-star-to-staunch-anti-CCP-activist">My Way</a>.]</strong> He explained how language shapes freedom and tyranny, how the cult of Maoism remains till this day in China, how Obama has annihilated America as a moral leader in the world, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Afjz_OFNsiI" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov">LIKE</a> Jamie Glazov’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov">Fan Page</a> on Facebook.</b></p>
<p><b>To watch previous <i>Glazov Gang</i> episodes, </b><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><b>Click Here</b></a><b>.<br />
</b></p>
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		<title>Ukraine Crisis Strengthens the China-Iran-Russia Axis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/ukraine-crisis-strengthens-the-china-iran-russia-axis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ukraine-crisis-strengthens-the-china-iran-russia-axis</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:55:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221431</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why addressing the Iranian nuclear threat has gotten that much harder. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/putin_flag.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221432" alt="putin_flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/putin_flag-450x343.jpg" width="315" height="240" /></a>Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and China have strengthened geopolitical ties to create a united front after President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed Crimea as a part of Russia and after the Crimean local government called for a referendum to secede the peninsula from Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Russian-American standoff over Ukraine has made these three nations more united in attempting to create a new power pole, counterbalancing and resisting the West— particularly the United States— in the region and beyond.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week, Iran&#8217;s state-run Press TV announced that Putin and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani agreed that Moscow would build two additional nuclear power plants for Tehran as well as construct new facilities next to Iran&#8217;s power plant in the city of Bushehr. Each plant will offer the Islamic Republic 1,000 megawatts of power and assist the Islamic Republic in eliminating its reliance on oil as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Since the Ukraine crisis, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Ali Akbar Salehi, has repeatedly pointed out that the Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to continue its mutual cooperation with Russia regarding its nuclear facilities and strategic interests. China, which generally follows Russia’s foreign policies when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, did not object to the recent moves. On the other hand, there has not been strong leadership from the West, particularly from the Obama administration, to condemn or halt such a move.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Islamic Republic is benefiting from the Ukrainian crisis, as it finds Russia moving closer towards Tehran to reinforce its strategic depth in the region to obstruct Western objectives. Putin and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are attempting to restore their wounded regional and international prestige by defying the West. In addition, Khamenei, Rouhani and his nuclear team are taking advantage of this crisis by feeling less pressure to make concessions in the current nuclear talks. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rouhani addressed the provincial managers and officials of Bushehr province pointing out, </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Our first nuclear power plant is active in the (Bushehr) province which will develop, God willing… Based on our estimates, the second nuclear power plant will be built in the same province and I hope that we can use the facilities of this province.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sallehi defiantly stated, “We are not obliged to introduce to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the nuclear facilities that we are to build in the future and only 180 days before entry of nuclear substances there, we will inform the IAEA of them.”</span></p>
<p>Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Russia, France, China, Britain and Germany) started their diplomatic negotiations this week to make headway on the nuclear dispute, which aims to create a lasting accord permanently resolving the decade-old nuclear standoff, preventing the Islamic Republic from obtaining an atomic bomb and possibly averting the threat of another war in the Middle East.  The interim nuclear deal expires on July 20<sup>th</sup> and the P5+1 are aiming at agreeing on comprehensive one before this date.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Several Western diplomats and policy analysts are claiming that the US-Russian confrontation is not going to undermine the quest for a final nuclear deal over Iran&#8217;s atomic activity or Tehran’s nuclear defiance; however, this idealistic view seems to be unrealistic.</span></p>
<p>Although Russia and China agreed to reconvene for the nuclear talks and hold meetings during the Ukraine crisis, this act does not necessarily mean that they are going to agree with the West’s terms for the final nuclear deal.  They are going to use these nuclear talks as geopolitical and strategic leverage to forcefully push for their own political and strategic agenda in the nuclear talks.</p>
<p>In other words, Russia and China are going to affect the final deal’s details and nuances that are being negotiated, including the amount of centrifuges that Tehran can retain, the level at which they are allowed to enrich uranium, the preservation of the plutonium reactor in Arak (Fordow), and the scope of IAEA inspectors monitoring the nuclear facilities.</p>
<p>As American-Russia tensions continue, Moscow is going to be far less strict on Iran’s nuclear program. While the Western powers attempt to significantly scale back and reduce Tehran’s centrifuges from approximately 20,000 to a few thousand, Moscow has been far more lenient, pointing out that it is willing to accept a final deal with Tehran retaining most of its nuclear infrastructure with nearly 20,000 centrifuges. Beijing has taken the same position.</p>
<p>The Ukraine crisis has provided Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran with a new platform to further establish their strategic depth and present themselves as influential political actors in the region. As the West-Russia standoff simmers, the Western powers will find it much more difficult to attain Moscow’s support for the specific terms that they desire in the final nuclear deal.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the Ukrainian crisis moves Russian leaders closer to their Iranian counterparts, Tehran is feeling less pressure to make concessions as well. The final deal will likely be much less strict on Iran’s nuclear activities, the number of the centrifuges it can retain, and the level of uranium enrichment it can pursue.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>“China is Not Only Our Enemy, It is the Enemy of All Muslims&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/china-is-not-only-our-enemy-but-it-is-the-enemy-of-all-muslims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=china-is-not-only-our-enemy-but-it-is-the-enemy-of-all-muslims</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 14:25:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[#myjihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221097</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["We have plans for many attacks in China.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chinawar.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-221098" alt="chinawar" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chinawar-450x173.jpg" width="450" height="173" /></a></p>
<p>China considers running people over with tanks to be a good way of handling a protest rally and thinks that waterboarding is for bleeding heart liberals.</p>
<p>It has armed forces with personnel numbering in the millions and a shared border. Too bad the Koran has nothing to say about &#8220;<a href="http://halalporkshop.blogspot.com/2014/03/china-is-not-only-our-enemybut-it-is.html">biting off more than you can chew</a>.&#8221;</p>
<blockquote><p>Entrenched in secret mountain bases on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, Uighur fighters are gearing up for retribution against China to avenge the deaths of comrades in Beijing’s crackdown on a separatist movement, their leader told a foreign news agency.</p>
<p>A mass stabbing at a train station in the Chinese city of Kunming two weeks ago, in which at least 29 people were killed, has put a new spotlight on the largely Muslim Uighur ethnic minority from Xinjiang, where Beijing says armed groups seek to establish an independent state called East Turkestan.</p>
<p>Beijing has called the Kunming bloodshed a “terrorist attack” carried out by militants, and says separatists operate training camps across the rugged border which abuts Pakistan and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>In a rare but brief interview, Abdullah Mansour, leader of the rebel Turkestan Islamic Party, said it was his holy duty to fight the Chinese.</p>
<p>“The fight against China is our Islamic responsibility and we have to fulfill it,” he said from an undisclosed location.</p>
<p>“China is not only our enemy, but it is the enemy of all Muslims … We have plans for many attacks in China,” he said, speaking in the Uighur language through an interpreter.</p>
<p>“We have a message to China that East Turkestan people and other Muslims have woken up. They cannot suppress us and Islam any more. Muslims will take revenge.”</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s pretty much all Muslims do. Take revenge, talk about taking revenge, celebrate the last time they took revenge, scream in outrage about the martyrdom of those who tried to take revenge and failed miserably.</p>
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		<title>Iranian Parliament&#8217;s Foreign Policy Spokesman Claims US Kidnapped Malaysian Plane</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/iranian-parliaments-foreign-policy-spokesman-claims-us-kidnapped-malaysian-plane/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iranian-parliaments-foreign-policy-spokesman-claims-us-kidnapped-malaysian-plane</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 13:31:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[malaysia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221101</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A conspiracy to “sabotage the relationship between Iran and China and Southeast Asia,"]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Seyyed-Hossein-Naqavi-Hosseini.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-221102" alt="Seyyed-Hossein-Naqavi-Hosseini" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Seyyed-Hossein-Naqavi-Hosseini-450x252.jpg" width="450" height="252" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/iranian-lawmaker-u-s-kidnapped-missing-malaysia-airliner-article-1.1718798">Obviously</a>. It had to be the US or Israel.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know why it wasn&#8217;t Israel. <a href="http://halalporkshop.blogspot.com/2014/03/iranian-lawmaker-claims-us-has.html">Maybe Iran no longer thinks</a> that Israel&#8217;s plane-napping skills are up to par</p>
<blockquote><p>Call off the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, an Iranian lawmaker has solved the mystery.</p>
<p>The United States “kidnapped” the airliner as part of a conspiracy to “sabotage the relationship between Iran and China and Southeast Asia,” parliamentarian Hossein Naghavi Hosseini said, according to a translation by The New York Times.</p>
<p>The parliamentarian, Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, who is the spokesman for the foreign policy committee, responded to the news on Tuesday that two Iranian nationals had been traveling on the missing flight holding stolen passports.</p>
<p>The fact that two Iranians were traveling on the plane using stolen passports was part of “the plot,” Hosseini reportedly said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Iran doesn&#8217;t need the US to do that. Iran&#8217;s bomb plot in Thailand and its support for Islamic Rohingya terror in Burma and Uyghur Islamic terror in China.</p>
<blockquote><p>Senior Iranian clerics like Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi and Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpaygani have condemned the recent killings of Muslims in China and asked the Foreign Ministry to seriously pursue the issue.</p>
<p>During the meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister&#8217;s Special envoy to Iran, Hossein Sheikh al-Islam reminded the Iranian clerics&#8217; sensitivity to the recent events in Xinjiang, and urged China to respect Muslims&#8217; rights in the region and provide proper conditions for the Muslims to hold their religious ceremonies.</p></blockquote>
<p>Clearly it&#8217;s America&#8217;s fault that Iran can&#8217;t stop clinging to its terrorists.</p>
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		<title>Chinese Communists Remind American Leftists What Torture Really Is</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/chinese-communists-remind-american-leftists-of-what-torture-really-is/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=chinese-communists-remind-american-leftists-of-what-torture-really-is</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/chinese-communists-remind-american-leftists-of-what-torture-really-is/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:24:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220768</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["The sickening crunch reverberated in his mind," ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Zhou-Wangyan-600.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-220771" alt="Zhou-Wangyan-600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Zhou-Wangyan-600-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>Obama, Thomas Friedman and other progressives constantly talk about how much America needs to be more like China, but <a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/china-brutality-yields-confessions-graft-1">this is a little reminder of what China really is</a> and how is really does things.</p>
<blockquote><p>The local Chinese official remembers all too clearly the panic he felt in Room 109. He had refused again and again to confess to bribery he says he didn&#8217;t commit, and his four Communist Party interrogators were forcing his legs farther apart than they could go.</p>
<p>Zhou Wangyan begged them to stop. But the men taunted him and kept pushing.</p>
<p>Then, with a loud &#8220;ka-cha,&#8221; his left thigh bone snapped. The sickening crunch reverberated in his mind, nearly drowning out his howls of pain and the frantic pounding of his heart.</p></blockquote>
<p>This incidentally is also what torture looks like. And Gitmo isn&#8217;t it.</p>
<blockquote><p>Zhou said he was deprived of sleep and food, nearly drowned, whipped with wires and forced to eat excrement. The others reported being turned into human punching bags, strung up by the wrists from high windows, or dragged along the floor, face down, by their feet&#8230;</p>
<p>Local anti-graft officials on a Hunan online forum in February last year denied Zhou was tortured, saying he injured himself by slipping in the bathroom.</p>
<p>&#8230;On at least three nights, they pinned him down and force-fed him feces and urine with a spoon. They dubbed the meals &#8220;American Western Feast&#8221; and &#8220;Eight Treasures Porridge.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Some of this is actually the result of China&#8217;s dysfunctional hybrid system of crony capitalism and Communist bureaucracy which is just as messy and unstable as our version of it. The corruption in both sectors is tremendous and the attempts at controlling it are themselves corrupted by corruption. China is cracking up though it isn&#8217;t obvious.</p>
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		<title>Iranian Purchased Tickets Used for Stolen Passports on Lost Plane</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/iranian-purchased-tickets-used-for-stolen-passports-on-lost-plane/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iranian-purchased-tickets-used-for-stolen-passports-on-lost-plane</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/iranian-purchased-tickets-used-for-stolen-passports-on-lost-plane/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:47:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220716</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The tickets were paid for in cash]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AP_missing_plane_family_crying_bc_140508_16x9_992.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-220717" alt="AP_missing_plane_family_crying_bc_140508_16x9_992" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AP_missing_plane_family_crying_bc_140508_16x9_992-450x252.jpg" width="450" height="252" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/10/malaysia-airlines-china-probe/6260177/">This certainly raises some questions</a>, but it&#8217;s also possible that considering the international range here, that this has more to do with Iran&#8217;s international drug operations, than with a bombing of the plane.</p>
<p>Muslims have begun escalating their conflict with China, and it&#8217;s entirely possible that a Muslim terrorist group has decided to retaliate by targeting a plane with a large number of Chinese passengers, but if Iran was stupid enough to target China, even covertly, it&#8217;s going to discover the difference between American leftists and Chinese leftists.</p>
<blockquote><p>Beijing sent two delegations here Monday to probe stolen passports as reports surfaced that an Iranian man purchased the two tickets used by those passengers on the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared Saturday off the coast of Vietnam.</p>
<p>Chinese diplomat Guo Shaochun arrived with a 10-member working group from the Chinese ministries of foreign affairs, transport, public security and the civil aviation administration. Earlier, a team from China&#8217;s Ministry of Public Security arrived to discuss the passports with their Malaysian counterparts.</p>
<p>The passports, one Italian and one Austrian, were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and 2013. CNN and the Financial Times, citing Thai police, reported that an Iranian man named Kazem Ali purchased the tickets used with the passports for two friends who he said wanted to return home to Europe. The tickets were paid for in cash, the reports said.</p>
<p>In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the Chinese government &#8220;urges the Malaysian side to step up their efforts to speed up the investigation and provide accurate information to China in a timely fashion.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Global Times, a leading Chinese Communist Party newspaper, was less diplomatic. &#8220;The Malaysian side cannot shirk its responsibilities,&#8221; said a biting editorial. &#8220;The initial response from Malaysia was not swift enough. There are loopholes in the work of Malaysia Airlines and security authorities.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>If this was a Muslim terrorist attack, then the perpetrators should have studied up on <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/01/world/asia/china-mekong-masscare-executions/">China&#8217;s response to the Mekong River Massacre</a>. China went outside its borders, coordinated the search for the druglord responsible, extradited him and his gang, and executed them.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
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