RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16052/russia-arctic-empire

These Russian claims have not yet been adjudicated by international law courts, the United Nations, or by any bilateral or multilateral treaty.

Russia’s blanket claims of territorial sovereignty pose a direct challenge to “Law of the Sea” conventions such as the “Freedom of Navigation” (FON) principle, championed by the U.S. and other Free World navies.

The aspirations of the five polar nations — Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S. — may also have to contend with the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China.

Perhaps a prudent path for the U.S. and Free World countries to adopt in the Arctic, given Moscow’s comprehensive advance and the China-Russia tandem, would be to maintain its nuclear submarine superiority while closely monitoring Russia’s own Northern Fleet based in the Arctic base of Murmansk. NATO successfully carried out this mission during the Cold War.

Moscow sent a spectacular message last month to the world’s other Arctic powers: Russia is determined to dominate the region. Russian transport aircraft, breaking the record for the highest altitude jump ever, parachuted a group of their Spetsnaz (Special Forces) over the Arctic. from a height of almost 33,000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet). Russian paratroops then executed a military exercise operation before reassembling at the Nagurskoye base, the northernmost military facility in Russia.

Any rival’s attempt to catch up and surpass Moscow’s head start in the Arctic is unlikely to succeed. Russia has a geopolitical advantage in that its sovereign land abuts over half of the Arctic’s territorial waters. Historically, Russia’s czars and commissars were frustrated in their attempts to secure warm-water ports, which would have benefited commerce and military force projection. Now, with environmental warming and subsequent accelerating ice-melt in the Arctic Ocean, Moscow appears poised to control the newest maritime corridor, “the Northeast Passage.” This waterway will unite Russian Europe with Russia’s Far East provinces adjacent to Pacific waters. The “Northeast Passage” could shorten the transshipment of goods from Asian countries to Europe by two weeks, rather than shipping goods through the Suez Canal route.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/29/chinas-communist-regime-shows-its-true-totalitarian-colors/

‘You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” That was Rahm Emanuel’s now-infamous prescription for the Democratic Party following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Now, China’s applying that same dictum globally, as the Wuhan virus ravages nation after nation, freeing Beijing to do its mischief.

For years, Americans of all political stripes operated under the delusion that China, though nominally communist, was becoming more like the West every day. Our massive, but one-sided, trade with the country would bring changes, we thought. An inevitable consumer economy in China would expand, and bring with it ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy.

China would moderate its behavior, the argument went, perhaps eventually easing its military threats against Taiwan, and letting Hong Kong maintain its status as a free-trading city-state outside of Beijing’s direct control.

That was our folly and our delusion, as we’re now finding out.

To begin with, China’s lies at the very beginning of the pandemic show, at best, gross negligence and incompetence, and at worst, intent to murder. As retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently wrote for the Hoover Institution, “Beijing piled lies atop heaps of corpses.”

With the world still distracted by fears of the coronavirus pandemic’s deadly impact and much of the West’s economy shut down, China used the crisis to expand its power by bullying its neighbors, crushing all dissent in Hong Kong, and making not-so-subtle military threats against the U.S.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/south-korea-is-the-pivot-in-the-huawei-wars/

South Korea has told Washington that restrictions on semiconductor sales to Huawei and other Chinese companies are “unacceptable,” according to industry sources. Seoul is trying to mediate between Beijing and Washington following the US Commerce Department’s May 18 announcement that sales of computer chips to companies on its “entity list” will require a license if they are produced with US technology, even if they are produced overseas by foreign companies.

After the US temporarily banned exports of high-end smartphone chips to China’s ZTE Corp in Aprl 2018, Huawei began a crash program to design its own chips. The Commerce Department’s new rules are designed to close what it calls a loophole in US export restrictions, the fabrication of Chinese-designed chips in Taiwan.

The extraterritorial assertion of control over third-party sales of products made with US equipment is unprecedented, and has no basis in international law, South Korea has remonstrated with Washington. China bought almost twice as much from South Korea during the last 12 months as the United States. Sixty percent of all Asian trade stays within Asia, due to tight integration of industrial supply chains. The Korea Times in a May 27 editorial denounced “Washington’s egocentric actions and Beijing bashing,” warning that “a  new Cold War and a trade war will deal a severe blow to Korea.”

President Trump bet the farm on the Huawei chip ban, I argued in a May 22 analysis. The US present has a monopoly on some key chip-making technology, in part because the R&D cost of challenging US companies is huge compared to the size of the equipment market. If the US uses its advantage to suppress technology elsewhere, China and other countries will put the resources required into breaking the US monopoly. China may not be able to buy chips made with US companies, but Chinese companies can hire anyone they want, and Chinese electrical engineers are conducting most of the research in the field. The US may extract short-term advantages, but at the cost of losing one of its last remaining advantages in high tech.

https://spectator.us/norway-health-chief-lockdown-tame-covid/

Norway is assembling a picture of what happened before lockdown and its latest discovery is pretty significant. It is using observed data — hospital figures, infection numbers and so on — to construct a picture of what was happening in March. At the time, no one really knew. It was feared that virus was rampant with each person infecting two or three others — and only lockdown could get this exponential growth rate (the so-called R number) down to a safe level of 1. This was the hypothesis advanced in various graphs by Imperial College London for Britain, Norway and several European countries.

But the Norwegian public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on March 12, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’ Here’s the graph, with the R-number on the right-hand scale:

https://spectator.us/xi-using-fear-covid-crush-hong-kong-autonomy/

The Hong Kong government has recently extended its COVID regulations banning gatherings of more than eight people until June 4. How convenient. Last year, according to organizers, 180,000 people gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989. In future, being an organizer may well land you in court under a new national security law, which Beijing announced last week at its annual National People’s Congress.

Perhaps we should have expected it. After all, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, lays down that the Hong Kong government should enact such a law, and the big party meeting in October told us that the ‘legal systems and implementation mechanisms for protecting national security’ would be set up. But given the recent protests, now did not seem the time to add fuel to the fire. In 2003, the then chief executive Tung Chee Hwa tried, but backed down in the face of 500,000 protesters. Later he resigned on the grounds of ill health, although he is still curiously vigorous in his support of Beijing’s interests.

The General Secretary in Beijing is not for turning. Xi Jinping is a man who doubles down. The attempt to introduce an extradition law in Hong Kong led to massive protests. Beijing allowed HK Chief Executive Carrie Lam to agree only to withdrawing the extradition bill. It gave instructions that continuing protests were to be met with increasingly fierce police tactics — ruining the excellent relations ‘Asia’s finest’ had hitherto enjoyed with the people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16075/germany-richard-grenell-legacy

Richard Grenell arguably has done more than any other American official, with the possible exception of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, to call out the duplicity, hypocrisy and recklessness of Germany’s foreign policy establishment.

Closely related to the defense spending issue is Germany’s increasing energy dependency on Russia…. while the United States is spending billions of dollars annually to defend Europe against growing threats from Russia, German energy policies are increasing Russia’s grip over Europe.

Grenell’s greatest achievement during his roughly two years as ambassador was his tireless pursuit of the American interest and his unwillingness to appease Germany’s anti-American establishment.

On April 30, 2020, after years of equivocating, the German government announced a compromise measure between German lawmakers who want to take a harder line against Iran and those who do not. The ban falls far short of a complete prohibition on Hezbollah and appears aimed at providing the German government with political cover that allows Berlin to claim that it has banned the group even if it has not.

“With @RichardGrenell, Germany is losing one of the best US Ambassadors to our country ever. Whether it was pressure to stop NordStream2, rethink German-Iranian regime (love) affairs or increase our defense expenditure – he was always on point and acting in the best interest of the United States and Germany. THANKS SO MUCH!” — Julian Röpke, political editor of Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper

Richard Grenell is stepping down from his role as U.S. ambassador to Germany. The move ends one of the most effective American ambassadorships to Berlin in recent memory.

Grenell arguably has done more than any other American official, with the possible exception of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, to call out the duplicity, hypocrisy and recklessness of Germany’s foreign policy establishment.

On a wide range of geopolitical issues — from relations with China, Iran and Russia to anti-Semitism, climate change, defense spending (NATO), energy dependence (Nord Stream), globalism, Hezbollah, Huawei and mass migration — Grenell embarrassed German leaders by showing that their words and actions do not match.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16076/china-devours-hong-kong

Beijing just imposed a raft of new security measures that will completely undermine the independence of Hong Kong’s own legislature. The new measures will apparently be announced in a few weeks — but one can assume that they include extradition to the mainland and imprisonment.

“In China they never really define what exactly is ‘national security’. So the law could change according to political expediency or political necessity,” Johannes Chan, a legal scholar in Hong Kong, told public broadcaster RTHK, according to The Guardian.

The measures will allow Beijing control over issues such as secession, foreign influence and terrorism which, in the view of pro-democracy activists, is little more than a blatant attempt by Beijing to suppress the anti-government protest movement that brought the territory to a standstill last year.

China’s imposition of a new security law on Hong Kong today is yet another attempt by the country’s communist rulers to make a blatant power grab by exploiting the coronavirus pandemic.

Ever since the deadly Covid-19 virus was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of last year, China’s ruling communist party (CCP) has been busily exploiting the pandemic to further Beijing’s strategic goals.

The Chinese have, for example, been particularly busy in the South China Sea where, apart from harassing less powerful neighbours such as Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, Beijing last month unilaterally passed measures to strengthen its control over a number of disputed territories, including the Spratly and Paracel Islands, where China’s People’s Liberation Army has constructed a network of illegal military bases.

Beijing has most lately turning its attention to the former British colony of Hong Kong where, in the face of stiff opposition from the territory’s 7.5 million inhabitants, the CCP aims to pass a new set of security laws that critics say will severely undermine Hong Kong’s quasi-autonomous status.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/voice_of_america_or_voice_of_the_mullahs_in_iran.html

I began working at VOA in Washington, D.C. following three years on the newly established ‘Radio Farda’ (the Persian language ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’), in Prague. I did not know that my fate as a journalist would be again decided by the people connected to the Islamic regime in Iran, as happened before at the ‘National Iranian Television’ — only this time a mile away from the White House and even less from the United States Congress.

At the VOA, I was hopeful that my abilities and years of experience would be directed towards “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thoughts” in line with the kind of values enshrined in the charter of the organization. In October 2006 and with the help of other colleagues, I launched a program titled ‘Tafsir Khabar’ (meaning ‘News Talk’) that was to have the highest ratings of any Persian-language TV show outside Iran for the next five years.

However, with the advent of the Obama administration and the start of a policy of appeasement towards the Iranian regime, there was a general change of atmosphere at the VOA and as such, entry into the Persian section for those with known affiliations to the Islamic republic were facilitated. This approach was justified on the grounds that it would help attain the compromise needed with Iran to secure a nuclear agreement with the ‘5+1’.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-is-a-natural-u-s-ally-in-the-new-cold-war-11590600011?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

It’s been an interesting week in India. A heat wave took temperatures up to 117 degrees in the sweltering north. An earthquake shook the northeastern state of Manipur as a massive cyclone slammed into coastal Odisha. Swarms of locusts have descended on cities and farms across the northwest. Record numbers of new cases were reported in India’s rapidly escalating Covid-19 epidemic. Meanwhile, villagers in Kashmir spotted and captured a “spy pigeon” with a coded message attached to a ring on its leg. As the code has not yet been broken, the pigeon’s mission remains unknown. Despite both a costly lockdown and a continuing surge in new Covid cases, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to dominate the political scene, with approval ratings of 80% or more in recent polls.

With the emerging cold war between the U.S. and China threatening to become the new central axis of world politics, the subcontinent has been pulled into the storm. Chinese and Indian troops have clashed this spring and the standoff continues. Pakistan is among the largest recipients of Chinese Belt and Road Initiative investments. Swallowing whatever qualms the Islamists among Pakistan’s leadership have about the plight of the Uighurs, the country has turned increasingly to China for aid, trade and diplomatic support. That is hardly surprising. With a population of 212 million and a gross domestic product of $325 billion, Pakistan can only maintain its rivalry with India (population 1.35 billion, GDP $2.7 trillion) with the help of a great-power ally.

American strategists, meanwhile, are anxiously—and correctly—keeping a close watch on India’s development. A wealthy, powerful and democratic India would help frustrate China’s hegemonic ambitions and substantially offset Chinese influence in Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. The stronger India becomes the less the U.S. must contribute to a balancing coalition of India, Japan, Australia and Vietnam that keeps Chinese ambitions in check.