RUTHFULLY YOURS

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to fling open the doors of Germany to more than a million migrants from the developing world baffled many. Although only a minority of these migrants were refugees fleeing persecution, with most of them seeking instead the chance of economic opportunities in Europe, it is widely believed that Mrs Merkel saw the presence of at least a proportion of Syrian refugees amongst their number as an opportunity finally to shake off the spectre of her country’s belligerent past and recast its reputation as a nation governed instead by conscience and compassion.http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-axis-of-destruction/
What she triggered, however, was political and social crisis. The migrants brought with them a disproportionate amount of violence, mainly sexual and directed at German women and girls. The political crisis was perhaps not so much in Germany, where she is ahead in pre-election opinion polling, but more widely in Europe where the combination of the Merkel gesture, the knowledge that many more millions were trying to get to Europe and the EU’s own free movement rule raised the spectre of an unmanageable flood of migrants causing social chaos and destroying European identity itself.
As Robert Curry points out sharply in this article: “In World War II, Germany’s conquest of Europe and subsequent defeat left the continent in ruins. This time, however, Germany’s actions seem designed to bring about Europe’s destruction by inviting conquest rather than by initiating it”.
Curry makes the equally sharp point that, far from being on the same historic page as Britain, France and America in the creation of modern western civilisation, Germany stood against it long before the horrors of Nazism. While Britain, France and America produced the Enlightenment, Germany produced the counter-Enlightenment.
Actually, there were significant differences within the Enlightenment itself in that, while Enlightenment thinking in Britain lay squarely within the context if Biblical morality, the French version was militantly atheistic, creating some of the distorted thinking in the west that passes for modern progressivism today. But most of that distortion can be traced back to German Romanticism that rejected Enlightenment thinking, and which led Germany to become such a problem for the west.
With Germany such a weak link in the chain, the enemies of the west understand very well that mass migration is the way they can destroy it through what might be called demographic colonialism. Turkey’s President Erdogan, who has said in terms that mass migration is the way to conquer the west for Islam, has his thumb on the migration spigot. He is threatening to release it and flood Europe with more Muslim migrants, thus blackmailing the EU to grant Turkey membership – and thus flood Europe with more Muslim migrants.
And now Dr Mordechai Kedar, the Middle East and Islam expert who thinks out of the box, has presented a yet more chilling scenario. He suggests that Iran and Russia plan to destroy western Europe, the US and Canada through a new wave of millions of Syrian Sunnis fleeing the Shi’ite takeover of Syria.
He writes that the millions of Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war will not be able to return once hostilities finally end, for two reasons: first, the place is in ruins, and second, they will be in justified fear of the new rulers of Syria – Shi’ite Iran.
“Iran has been moving Shiites from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan to Syria for a long time in a clear attempt to change the demographic makeup of the country from the Sunni majority it had before the civil war broke out in 2011. The issue could not be more clear because it is no secret that the pre-civil war Sunni majority considered the Alawite rulers heretic idol worshippers who had no right to live in Syria, much less rule over it.

The nuclear confrontation between the US and North Korea entered a critical phase Sunday with North Korea’s conduct of an underground test of a thermonuclear bomb.

If the previous round of this confrontation earlier this summer revolved around Pyongyang’s threat to attack the US territory of Guam, Sunday’s test, together with North Korea’s recent tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental US, was a direct threat to US cities.

In other words, the current confrontation isn’t about US superpower status in Asia, and the credibility of US deterrence or the capabilities of US military forces in the Pacific. The confrontation is now about the US’s ability to protect the lives of its citizens.

The distinction tells us a number of important things. All of them are alarming.

First, because this is about the lives of Americans, rather than allied populations like Japan and South Korea, the US cannot be diffident in its response to North Korea’s provocation. While attenuated during the Obama administration, the US’s position has always been that US military forces alone are responsible for guaranteeing the collective security of the American people.

Pyongyang is now directly threatening that security with hydrogen bombs. So if the Trump administration punts North Korea’s direct threat to attack US population centers with nuclear weapons to the UN Security Council, it will communicate profound weakness to its allies and adversaries alike.

Obviously, this limits the options that the Trump administration has. But it also clarifies the challenge it faces.

The second implication of North Korea’s test of their plutonium-based bomb is that the US’s security guarantees, which form the basis of its global power and its alliance system are on the verge of becoming completely discredited.

In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Trish Regan, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton was asked about the possible repercussions of a US military assault against North Korea for the security of South Korea.

Regan asked, “What are we risking though if we say we’re going to go in with strategic military strength?… Are we going to end up with so many people’s lives gone in South Korea, in Seoul because we make that move?” Bolton responded with brutal honesty.

“Let me ask you this: how do you feel about dead Americans?” In other words, Bolton said that under prevailing conditions, the US faces the painful choice between imperiling its own citizens and imperiling the citizens of an allied nation. And things will only get worse. Bolton warned that if North Korea’s nuclear threat is left unaddressed, US options will only become more problematic and limited in the years to come.

This then brings us to the third lesson of the current round of confrontation between the US and North Korea.