RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rules-of-geopolitics-are-different-in-asia-11567460320

Colombo, Sri Lanka

The drama in Washington sometimes makes this difficult to remember, but the most important foreign-policy development of the current presidential term isn’t the president’s tweets. It is the slow, inexorable shift in American strategy from the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters of world politics to what U.S. diplomats and military officials call the “Indo-Pacific.” That shift, which the Obama administration called the “pivot to Asia,” isn’t the special property of Republicans or Democrats, of national-security hawks or doves.

Yet if Americans are increasingly united on the importance of the Indo-Pacific, we are very far from united on strategy there. This is partly because the executive branch is led by a president with unconventional views who is often at daggers drawn with the network of professionals and institutions that have shaped American foreign policy for many decades. But larger forces are at work than President Trump.

Never in human history have so many people and states faced such an avalanche of political and economic change as the Indo-Pacific faces today. If American policy makers find it challenging to understand and respond, they aren’t alone. The teams around Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe are often similarly perplexed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/everyone-loses-in-germany-11567445967

European elections these days are generally contests between a beleaguered mainstream and insurgent alternatives. Voters in two German states on Sunday chose a form of “none of the above” as the country stumbles out of the Angela Merkel era.

The biggest vote-getters were the main parties of the center. Mrs. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) came out on top in Saxony, a state they’ve governed since 1990. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), with whom Mrs. Merkel maintains an awkward coalition at the national level, are on track to maintain their long-time control in Brandenburg.

Yet both parties emerged with diminished support. The CDU’s share in Saxony fell to 32% from above 39% in 2014, while the SPD’s Brandenburg total dropped to 26% from 32%. The result raises new questions about Mrs. Merkel’s preferred successor to lead the CDU and the country, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who doesn’t excite voters anywhere. It also accentuates the crisis of confidence afflicting the leaderless SPD, which can’t decide whether its national coalition with Mrs. Merkel is hurting or helping its fortunes.

The alternatives also underperformed expectations. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party did increase its vote totals to 27.5% in Saxony and 23.5% in Brandenburg from 10% and 12% five years ago, respectively. But this is unlikely to be a harbinger of national success, even if the AfD is currently the largest opposition party in the national parliament.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/18/quantum-revolution-is-coming-chinese-scientists-are-forefront

China’s drive to dominate a field with big economic and military applications outpaces some U.S. strides

HANGHAI — More than a decade ago, Chinese physicist Pan Jian-Wei returned home from Europe to help oversee research into some of the most important technology of the 21st century.

At a conference in Shanghai this summer, Pan and his team offered a rare peek at the work he described as a “revolution.”

They spoke of the hacking-resistant communications networks they are building across China, the sensors they are designing to see through smog and around corners, and the prototype computers that may someday smash the computational power of any existing machine.

All the gear is based on quantum technology — an emerging field that could transform information processing and confer big economic and national-security advantages to countries that dominate it. To the dismay of some scientists and officials in the United States, China’s formidable investment is helping it catch up with Western research in the field and, in a few areas, pull ahead.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu/johnson-threatens-brexit-rebels-with-party-expulsion-idUSKCN1VN0BS

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday ruled out ever asking the European Union to delay Britain’s departure from the bloc, making an implicit warning to lawmakers that he could be forced to call an election if they tied his hands on Brexit. Johnson’s promise to take the country out of the European Union on Oct. 31 with or without a divorce deal has propelled the United Kingdom towards a constitutional crisis and a battle with the 27 other members of the bloc. 

An alliance of opposition lawmakers are plotting with rebels in Johnson’s Conservative Party to take control of parliament and tie the government’s hands with legislation that would block a no-deal exit.

Johnson, giving an hastily organised statement at a lectern outside Number 10 Downing Street, said he would never delay Brexit which was delayed twice by his predecessor, Theresa May.

“I want everybody to know there are no circumstances in which I will ask Brussels to delay: we are leaving on 31st Oct, no ifs or buts,” Johnson said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14787/erdogan-elections-losses

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promised party fans a clear election victory in Istanbul [on the June 23 rerun] — but lost, this time, by a margin of more than 800,000 votes, compared to only 13,000 in the original race.

“Your wrath stems from the fear in you.” — Meral Danış Baştas, Kurdish MP, replying to Erdoğan.

By using an administrative decision as a pretext to oust elected mayors, Erdogan is effectively nullifying millions of Kurdish votes. Moreover, if the ousted mayors actually had proven links to terrorist organizations, why were they allowed to run in an election in the first place?

This drama will probably continue: Kurds will elect their leaders, Erdoğan will sack them. Kurds again will elect their leaders, Erdoğan will sack them too. Kurds will vote for other leaders and Erdoğan will sack them too.

Erdoğan should sit down, think and find out: why do his country’s 20 million or so Kurds insist on invariably electing “terrorists” as mayors to their cities and towns, and defying his calls to do otherwise?

No one in the saner parts of the world has ever claimed that Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is a liberal democrat who never in the slightest rigged election results. But he was, at least, known to respect the ballot box. No longer. Erdoğan has taken to ridiculing even further whatever little remains of Turkey’s democratic culture.

Claiming vote-rigging, he pressured Turkey’s supreme election board for a recount of ballots cast on March 31 in Istanbul, Turkey biggest city, which boasts more than 10 million registered voters. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) had lost municipal elections in Istanbul by a small margin of 13,000 votes. This was the first time Erdoğan’s party had lost elections in Istanbul since 1994. The man who is notorious for saying “who wins Istanbul, wins Turkey” immediately ordered a rerun.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274810/uk-you-could-soon-be-arrested-crimes-you-havent-robert-spencer

Philip K. Dick’s story “The Minority Report,” made into a movie in 2002 directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, takes us to a nightmarish Washington, DC, in the year 2054, where police arrest people based on crimes that psychics say they’re going to commit in the future. That dystopia could come to Britain 35 years early if the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change gets its way. According to the Guardian, the Institute has recommended that “a new law allowing for hate groups to be designated and punished before they turn to violence is needed in order to tackle far-right extremists.”

“Before they turn to violence” — that is, even if there is no indication that they will ever be violent.

The Guardian notes that the authors of Narratives of Hate: The Spectrum of Far-Right Worldviews in the UK, the Tony Blair Institute report calling for this, “acknowledge that the issue of linking violent and nonviolent extremism is contentious and steps would need to be taken to protect free speech.”

That’s window dressing meant to deceive the public into complacency. There is no way to criminalize certain opinions while protecting the freedom of speech.

The Guardian continues: “The law…would designate hate groups as organisations that spread intolerance and antipathy towards people of a different race, religion, gender or nationality, the report said.”

The danger of this is that it is universally taken for granted among the political and media elites that honest analysis of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims constitutes spreading “intolerance and antipathy towards people of a different race, religion, gender or nationality.” Such analysis is consistently lumped together with racist groups, as if race hatred were the same thing as opposition to jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274784/islam-wests-most-formidable-and-persistent-enemy-raymond-ibrahim

At the height of Western dominance over Islam in the early twentieth century, the European historian Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) made a remarkably prescient observation that may have seemed exaggerated at the time:

Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past (from Belloc’s The Great Heresies, 1938, emphasis added).

Anyone who doubts that Islam has been “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had,” should familiarize themselves with Islam’s long offensive record vis-à-vis the West.   A succinct summary follows:

According to Islamic history, in 628, the Arabian founder of Islam, Muhammad, called on the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius—the symbolic head of Christendom—to recant Christianity and embrace Islam.  The emperor refused, jihad was declared, and the Arabs invaded Christian Syria, defeating the imperial army at the pivotal Battle of Yarmuk in 636.

This victory enabled the Muslims to swarm in all directions, so that, less than a century later, they had conquered the greater, older, and richer part of Christendom, including Syria, Egypt, and North Africa.

Their drive into Europe from the east was repeatedly frustrated by the Walls of Constantinople; after the spectacularly failed siege of 717-718, many centuries would pass before any Muslim power thought to capture the imperial city. The Arabs did manage to invade Europe proper through and conquered Spain but were stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732 and eventually driven back south of the Pyrenees.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14767/europe-dreams-immigration

Unfortunately, the European mindset refuses to face the reality, as if the challenge is too severe to be addressed.

“The conference took place under the theme ‘Penser l’Europe’ [‘Thinking of Europe’]… There, I was disturbed to hear Tariq Ramadan speaking of Europe as dar al-Shahada, i.e. house of Islamic belief. The attending audience was alarmed, but did not get the message of the perception of Europe… as a part of house of Islam. If Europe is no longer perceived as dar al-Harb/house of war, but viewed as part of the peaceful house of Islam, then this is not a sign of moderation, as some wrongly assume: it is the mindset of an Islamization of Europe”. — Bassam Tibi, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Goettingen.

It is a false Marxist notion among young people here in Europe that if you are successful or comfortable, it can only have been at the expense of humanity: “If I win, somebody else must lose.” There seems to be no concept at all of “win-win” — “If I win, all of you can win too: everyone can win!” — which underpins the free economy and has lifted so much of the world so spectacularly out of poverty.

It is important to… reject the current fashion of self-abasement. Europe seems to be afflicted with a skepticism about the future, as if the decline of the West is actually a justified punishment and a liberation from its faults of the past…. “For me, today,” notes Alain Finkielkraut, “the most essential thing is European civilization”.

Europe presents itself as the vanguard of the unification of humanity. Europe’s cultural roots, as a result, have been put at risk. According to Pierre Manent, a renowned French political scientist and a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris:

“European pride or European self-consciousness depend on the rejection of European history and European civilization! We want nothing to do with the Christian roots and we absolutely want to be perfectly welcoming to Islam”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14788/trump-iran-deceiving-mullahs

Both President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair told me at different times that they had identified “men with whom we can work” in Tehran and that the key to success was getting rid of Khamenei and his “hardliners.”

[W]hether we like it or not, it is Khamenei, and not Rafsanjani, Khatami or Rouhani, who set the tune in the Islamic Republic.

Thus if Trump, or anyone else, wish to make a deal with the present regime in Tehran, the man they should talk to is Khamenei, not Rouhani, an actor playing the president.

[T]he two are, in fact, just one creature in two disguises, a witch bent on doing mischief.

Trump has been warned!

For a few hours last weekend, political circles in Tehran were seized with speculative fever regarding a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and the Islamic Republic’s President Hassan Rouhani. Trump had announced in Biarritz, where the G7’s farcical summit was held, that he would be prepared to meet the Iranian mullah and believed that could happen soon. For his part, Rouhani went on TV to declare readiness to meet “anyone”, with no ifs and buts.

One “reformist” analyst phoned me in the middle of night Paris time to “inform” me that, with help from Trump, his faction was about to win a decisive victory over the “hardline” faction led by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei.

In his narrative, Rouhani would meet Trump in September when both are to attend the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York. They would establish a “roadmap” leading to an agreement incorporating the Obama “nuke deal” plus additional demands by Trump. That, in turn, would lead to a lifting of US sanctions, saving the Iranian economy from a meltdown.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274735/mexico-bleeding-stephen-brown

It is a very tragic story currently unfolding in America’s southern neighbor where deadly violence is now almost a way of life.

According to data released by Mexico’s National System for Public Security, murders this year in the Latin American country are at an all-time high. Statistics show there has been more killings in the first six months of 2019 than ever before in the country’s history. (Mexicans started keeping records on their country’s murder rate in 1996.)

The total number of victims for the first half of 2019 comes to more than 17,000 people, a new record. This represents a 5.6 per cent increase in killings over the same time period last year. And also amounts to about 90 people slaughtered per day.

Three thousand murders were recorded in June, 2019, alone, which is an increase of 232 over the same month last year. This is the most murders ever recorded for a single month.

These figures do not include victims of other serious crimes such as, for example, kidnapping, attempted murder or extortion.