RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/australian-strategy-and-the-gathering-storm-in-asia/

The US world order is a suit that no longer fits.
               —Fu Ying, Chair, Chinese National People’s Congress, Foreign Affairs Committee, 2016

Over the next decade two challenges face Australia which, in combination, seem likely to transform our strategic fortunes for the worse. The first challenge is the need to confront the reality that the great project of Western liberal globalism conceived in the 1990s is slipping into the pages of history. The second challenge is the return of great power competition, most particularly in the form of the rise of a revisionist China that is determined to assume global superpower status and to become the hegemon of Asia. China’s geopolitical ambitions mean that the 2020s and beyond will be marked by a Sino-American struggle for mastery of Asia in which Australia will be directly and fatefully involved.

Outside of expert circles, few Australians seem to grasp the implications of these major strategic changes. It is the purpose of this article to explain the dynamics of a gathering storm in Asia and to make the case for a national rejuvenation in thinking about defence and national security strategy.

The end of liberal globalism

For the past quarter of a century, Australia has been a major beneficiary of the West’s global triumph in the Cold War. This era coincides with the most dramatic growth in Australian prosperity since the boom of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Australian economy tripled in size, and per capita GDP grew by 182 per cent, between the early 1990s and the second decade of the new millennium. Yet, as we enter the 2020s, the age of liberal globalism is disappearing—as documented by a group of Anglo-American scholars and commentators as politically diverse as John J. Mearsheimer, Bill Emmott, Steven D. King, Patrick Deneen and Michael Burleigh. The reasons are not hard to detect. Put simply, the liberal global order is ebbing away because of a self-induced crisis of legitimacy. Liberal globalism has become a system that privileges transnational elites over national voters; seeks to preference the rules of international institutions over domestic democratic legislation; promotes universalism over patriotism; and has pursued open borders rather than controlled immigration, so creating new forms of populist nationalism. As Patrick Deneen writes in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), the global liberal project has promoted a form of elitist progressive politics that has accelerated economic inequality and fragmented the civic and spiritual bonds that underpin cultural life in democratic nations. There has been a backlash from ordinary voters and the Western public has discovered a fundamental truth: it is easier to change elites than it is for the elites to change the public.

Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union and Donald Trump’s America First policy are merely the early results of an emerging array of new democratic political forces driven by a renewed sense of nationalism and cultural conservatism. By the early 2030s it is possible that the rump of liberal globalism may still operate with its assorted transnational elites meeting annually in a glare of electronic publicity at Davos. Yet such gatherings will increasingly resemble the irrelevant universalism of the late Holy Roman Empire and be confined to symbolic gestures on climate change, arms control and economic inequality.

The real drama in world affairs will emanate from the strategic competition developing between the United States and China.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/sharia_the_law_of_the_land_in_afghanistan.html

Beyond our current concerns with the coronavirus pandemic looms the “historic” formal agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban signed on February 29, 2020.

The three-and-a-half page conditional peace agreement (which is accompanied by secret annexes) provides a means for the U.S. to draw down its forces from 13,000 to 8,600 within 135 days of the agreement, then subsequently remove all of its forces from Afghanistan within 14 months. A major part of the agreement hinges on the ludicrous assertion that “Afghan soil will [no longer] be used against the security of the United States and its allies.”

Apart from concerns that the Taliban has no intention of disavowing its ties to multiple terrorist organizations (including its longtime ally, al-Qaeda), upholding a reduction in violence (RiV) or consenting to a permanent ceasefire; Afghanistan’s future political roadmap may be more than the Afghan government can bear after the current military balance tips the other direction — in favor of the Taliban who have already gained control of more territory in Afghanistan since 9/11.

While there are four parts to the public agreement, “the obligations of the [Taliban] in [the] agreement apply in areas under their control until the formation of the new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government as determined by the intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations.” It comes as no surprise the Taliban has refused to talk to the 21-member Afghan government negotiating team.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15886/turkey-erdogan-coronavirus-economy

Before the coronavirus, Turkey hoped its tourism revenues might reach as high as $45 billion this year. But in the first quarter of the year, the number of passengers traveling through Turkish airports fell by 18.8%, and the second quarter does not look promising. Economists agree that the year-end decline will be even sharper.

This is where alarm bells ring for Erdoğan. Turks are scheduled to go to the ballot box again in 2023 to elect the president and members of parliament.

Erdoğan owes his spectacular election victories, uninterrupted since 2002, in large part to rapid economic growth and the subsequent improvement in the standard of living. A reversal now could end his glittering political career.

Erdoğan remains the potential victim of a small virus.

We may be months away from Covid-19’s global peak but the punishing, global, post-pandemic economic repercussions will vary from one country to another, depending on what economic vulnerabilities the pandemic has caught off-guard. One anticipated outcome is to see bigger post-corona damage to economies that have a large dependence on tourism and on economies with fundamental imbalances. Turkey belongs in both categories.

In the early days of the virus, before the skyrocketing number of cases, Turkey’s fragile economy boasted 4.3 million jobless. The official unemployment rate was 13.8%.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-will-halt-funding-to-world-health-organization-over-coronavirus-response/ar-BB12Diws?li=BBnb7Kz

WASHINGTON—President Trump said the U.S. would halt funding to the World Health Organization while his administration investigates what he called the group’s mismanagement of the coronavirus response.

The president faulted the WHO for, in his view, failing to adequately investigate early information about the virus’s ability to spread from one human to another and for not calling out China on its alleged lack of transparency over the virus.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/04/13/concern-grows-in-germany-over-antisemitic-propaganda-tied-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

A prominent psychologist in Berlin who deals with extremist groups has expressed fear that the coronavirus pandemic will encourage a further wave of antisemitism in Germany.

“An attempt is being made to spread the image of an enemy that people are already familiar with,” psychologist Ahmad Mansour told the Tagesschau news outlet over the weekend, when asked about a rash of antisemitic images associating Jews with the virus.

Mansour — an Israeli Arab and former Islamist who now works on counter-extremism programs in the German Muslim community — observed that the “images are very popular and widespread, online and offline.”

One image being shared by antisemitic agitators depicts crudely-stereotyped Jews smuggling the virus into a city in a Trojan Horse, along with an accompanying text railing against the “devious Jewish Orthodox Freemason sect, aka Zionists.”

Mansour warned that antisemitic messages increasingly urged violence against Jews.

“I don’t just see conspiracy theories,” he said. “I see incitement, calls for injuries to Jews.”

German government officials monitoring extremist activity quoted in the same article concurred that the danger was growing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15861/palestinians-human-rights-syria

Those in the international community expressing concern about the possible spread of the virus in the Gaza Strip are ignoring the existing tragedy of the Palestinians in Syria, particularly those held in various Syrian government-controlled prisons.

While Palestinian Authority leaders have been urging Israel to release Palestinian prisoners in Israel out of fear they may be infected with coronavirus, these same leaders have left, without saying a word, hundreds of Palestinians held in Syrian jails.

“Such practices represent flagrant violations of international law which criminalizes all forms of torture and mistreatment against civilians,” the Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS) stated.

An Arab persecuting or torturing an Arab never seems to be condemned by the international community…. The reason the world does not care about the atrocities committed against Palestinians in Syria: they cannot blame Israel for them.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians of Syria live in an Arab country. Were those Palestinians living in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, the international media, the United Nations and human rights organizations would have interrupted the daily media fare of coronavirus by shouting day and night about Israel’s purported persecution of the Palestinians.

As the world is busy combating the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Palestinians are continuing to “disappear” in Syrian prisons — or otherwise die. Those in the international community expressing concern about the possible spread of the virus in the Gaza Strip are ignoring the existing tragedy of the Palestinians in Syria, particularly those held in various Syrian government-controlled prisons.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/venezuelas-beleaguered-president-waiting-david-paulin/

The Trump administration has implicitly acknowledged that its Venezuela policy has a major problem: Juan Guaidó. Venezuela’s beleaguered president-in-waiting, a leftist at heart, has gotten considerable support from the Trump administration to achieve a major U.S. policy goal: ease out Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, a stooge of Cuba and Russia. Guaidó would then serve as interim president in a democratic Venezuela.

The 36-year-old Guaidó, a professional politician backed by Venezuela’s democratically elected National Assembly, has nevertheless let down the Trump administration, and he may even be playing the president for a chump if recent comments by his ad hoc adviser are anything to go by. Maduro, meanwhile, has doubled down on the late President Hugo Chávez’s socialist policies, ensuring that oil-rich yet impoverished Venezuela remains an economic basket case and authoritarian hell-hole.

Political allies, of course, are expected to behave in a certain way: friendship is a two-way street. Trump, for his part, has bent over backwards to support Guaidó, a self-declared political independent who previously was a member of Popular Will, a left-wing political party with socialist ties. Guaidó’s fruitless quest to assume Venezuela’s presidency also has gotten steadfast support from some 60 countries. But Maduro hasn’t budged.

Now that the Trump administration has wised up to Guaidó, it has asked him to renounce his claim to Venezuela’s presidency while nevertheless continuing to support him. Under this plan, Maduro and Guaidó would establish an interim government and agree to elections in six to 12 months. In exchange, Washington would ease up on sanctions against Maduro’s regime. Guaidó is seen as a shoo-in over Maduro in a general election. Not surprisingly, Maduro has rejected the plan, for now, while using the cornonavirus pandemic as an excuse to crack down on political opponents.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/indias-covid-19-super-spreader-tablighi-jamaat-radhika-singh/

Tablighi Jamaat has been making headlines after becoming known as the super-spreaders of the novel coronavirus across South Asian countries, India in particular, where they held a gigantic religious congregation, despite the government-sanctioned lockdown. If mingling with thousands of Indians and transmitting the virus in a country of 1.4 billion people was not enough, Jamaat members and their accomplices have resorted to pelting with stones the police officials who came to quarantine them and the medical officials who tried to treat them. They also harassed female medical staff by marching naked in front of them in hospitals. Despite these actions, their apologists race to defend them, because the Muslims can never be wrong.

However, this is not the first time India is reeling under the threat of the Islamic radicals of Tablighi Jamaat. In February 2002, the Muslim extremists who torched the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, burning 57 Hindu devotees to death, are also suspected to have been members of this Jamaat.

Though little known, the Tablighi Jamaat is far from being an  innocuous socio-cultural organisation, as liberal media would like you to believe. It is an India-based radical Islamist hydra with multiple heads, and has its tentacles spread worldwide, with corroborated connections to violence, vandalism, terrorists and terror activities across the globe. The movement, which operates out of 150 countries, boasts between 50 million and 150 million adherents. An offshoot of the fundamentalist Deobandi movement, the Jamaat believes Islam must have hegemony over all other faiths, and is out to establish the rule of Islam globally, albeit stealthily.