RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/radical_islam_and_the_clash_of_civilizations.html

The Biden administration will go to great lengths to downplay the significance of the debacle in Afghanistan. But no amount of wishful thinking or meaningless creations like over-the-horizon capabilities will deny the reality that the loss of Afghanistan has implications for the conflict with radical Islam far beyond Afghanistan’s geographic borders.

Culture is the primary context in which statecraft takes place. It is a concept that runs through the works of the late Professor Adda Bozeman, who understood that diplomats often talk past each other because the culture and linguistic context in which they operate mean different things.

To properly understand the meaning of the current catastrophe, it is necessary to ask the most fundamental question, which is not how is this playing in Peoria, but how is this playing in throughout the Islamic world? The Biden administration can spin the collapse of Afghanistan endlessly, but no amount of press conferences will change the perception within Islam of America’s defeat.

We in the West believe in the triumph of an ineluctable future that will be a vast improvement over the past. When our progress toward that future is limited or regressive, we become impatient. In non-western societies, however, it is not the future that is looked toward, but a golden past that needs to be resurrected.

Since centuries have elapsed without that resurrection, time is perceived differently. The rebirth of a golden past is inevitable. All that is required is to have faith and patience. Twenty years might seem like an endless war to Americans, but to Muslims it is a grain of sand in the measure of time. If the Taliban had to resist another twenty years, if they had to sacrifice another generation to be rid of the infidels on their land, they would have done so.

For Islam, the choices are not the ones the Biden administration has articulated, a choice between leaving and a war without end. The choice is between resurrecting the golden age of Islam or ceding victory to the infidel. It is not a choice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-surge-in-malaysia-threatens-to-prolong-global-chip-shortage-11630234802

SINGAPORE—A surge of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia, a little-known but critical link in the semiconductor supply chain, has opened a new front in the battle to fix manufacturing woes that have rippled across industries during a global shortage of computing chips.

The Southeast Asia nation is one of the world’s top destinations for assembly and testing of the devices that control smartphones, car engines and medical equipment. Disruptions in Malaysia threaten to prolong uncertainty over chip supply well into next year, dashing hopes of relief in the second half of 2021.

The supply crunch in Malaysia, caused primarily by staff shortages linked to virus-control measures combined with a sharp surge in global demand, poses a new problem for the auto industry. For the first half of this year, shortages largely stemmed from companies miscalculating the pace of economic recoveries and not ordering enough parts. Now they can’t always get the parts they need because Covid-19 outbreaks are denting factory output.

“It’s a bit like a game of whack-a-mole,” said Ravi Vijayaraghavan, a Singapore-based partner at the consulting firm Bain & Co. specializing in semiconductors. “We think we have supply sorted out, and then a problem suddenly pops up somewhere else.”

Some of the world’s leading car makers including Toyota Motor Corp. , Ford Motor Co. , General Motors Co. and Nissan Motor Co. have disclosed major production cuts due largely to chip shortages from factories in Malaysia. Ford suspended work for about a week at an F-150 plant in the Kansas City, Mo., area and a Fiesta factory in Cologne, Germany because of missing parts, while Toyota said it would cut global production by around 40% in September. General Motors said it expects to make 100,000 fewer vehicles in North America in the second half of the year.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/north-korea-exploits-bidens-weakness-restart-nuke-daniel-greenfield/

Weakness is a pretty clear message and the message has been received. It was received in Iran, in China, and in North Korea.

Everything it’s been received our enemies have responded by pushing the limit to see how much they can get away with.

The Norks are no different.

North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, thought to have been shut down since December 2018, is apparently operating again, according to the U.N. atomic agency. “Since early July, there have been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operations of the reactor,” said a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The reactor is allegedly producing plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, according to Gary Samore of Brandeis University. 

That would put this within the window of Biden’s withdrawal announcement. Not to mention his previous kowtowing to Iran.

Under these conditions, why shouldn’t North Korea play Biden like a fiddle?

Pyongyang has also ignored overtures made by the Joe Biden administration since it took office in January, while warning Seoul and Washington of a “serious security crisis” for staging their regular joint military exercise this month.

During his Seoul visit, the special US envoy for the North said he and his South Korean counterpart had discuss possible humanitarian assistance to the North.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/china-biden-no-good-relations-unless-us-drops-daniel-greenfield/

Communist China is really desperate to stop any probes of the origins of the Wuhan Virus.

A senior Chinese diplomat called on the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to work with the Taliban government and stop pressuring Beijing over the virus origin probe in order to improve ties between the world’s biggest economies.

Wang added that China opposed the U.S. intelligence community’s inquiry into the source of Covid-19, the virus that caused the worst pandemic in more than a century. He accused the U.S. of turning the coronavirus into a political issue if the Biden administration wanted to bring bilateral relations “back on the right track,” the Xinhua report said.

The official PRC readout states, “If the U.S. side also hopes to bring bilateral relations back on the right track, it should stop blindly smearing and attacking China, and stop undermining China’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

By that, Foreign Minister Wang Yi meant apparently that, “China resolutely opposes the so-called investigation report on COVID-19 origins tracing produced by the U.S. intelligence community recently. Politicizing origins tracing is a political burden left by the former U.S. government. The sooner the U.S. side unloads this burden, the easier it will be to get out of the current predicament.”

By “former U.S. government”, Yi means the Trump administration.

The PRC has a lot of nerve trying to urge the Biden administration to abandon origin probes as a legacy of the Trump administration. It’s all but an announcement that it expects the Biden administration to choose the PRC over Republicans.