RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/terrorism-ukraine-taiwan-and-outsourcing-wars-daniel-greenfield/

In the 90s, Russia was a spent force. The consensus was that free enterprise had defeated Communism. And it had. Russia isn’t fighting for Communism, but for market dominance.

A generation later we’re watching what may be the largest outsourcing war of a new century.

Russia, like China, rebooted its economy by exploiting the growing desire of western liberalism to accommodate environmentalists and socialists by offshoring their ‘dirty’ industries.

The United States outsourced its manufacturing to China which took on everything from making dollar store trinkets to recycling our used soda bottles while our elites focused on preparing the populace for the “jobs of the future” that would all involve using a computer. Now the PRC has a rising middle class and America has a falling one. China is building entire new cities for its middle class while the American middle class can no longer afford to buy a house or a car.

Europeans outsourced the responsibilities of powering their cities and heating their homes to Russia. While they tinkered with windmills and solar panels, Russia built an energy monopoly. Now it’s expanding its monopolistic control the way that most powers and empires used to.

Russia may want all or part of Ukraine for nationalistic reasons, but, more importantly, because of pipeline routes and energy reserves. The underlying motive for this war is gas and the European nations decrying the invasion were the ones who provided the motive for the war.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/04/putins-war-and-the-lessons-of-history/

The Hon. Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015

We who shrink from war because it’s morally wrong have to make others shrink from war because they’d likely lose. —Tony Abbott

In his prescient address to the Danube Institute in Budapest on February 21, Tony Abbott criticized Western democracies’ failure to boost their military capabilities and predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine that took place just three days later. We print here the full text of his address, courtesy of Tony Abbott and John O’Sullivan, president of the Danube Institute and Quadrant’s international editor.

* * *

SOME years ago, at an East Asia Summit in Burma, I found myself standing with Japan’s Shinzo Abe, plus China’s Le Keqiang and the Sultan of Brunei. China’s premier was upbraiding the prime minister over Japan’s war record, so to create a distraction, I grabbed the sultan and loudly told him that he must be very angry about British colonialism.

Having thus seized the antagonists’ attention, I observed to Le Keqiang that history was a good teacher but a bad master. So with that in mind, I’ve adjusted the topic of this talk from the revenge of history to the lessons of history, because history isn’t malicious, just instructive.

It tells us that progress isn’t inevitable; that justice isn’t always done; that good won’t always win; and that danger always lurks. Above all, it tells us that individual and collective choice matters: that our beliefs drive our actions, and that havoc can be wreaked, or stopped, because people decide to make a stand.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18395/eu-global-power-strategy

The goal is “strategic autonomy” — the ability for the EU to act independently of, and as a counterweight to, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — in matters of defense and security.

The key component of the Strategic Compass is the development of a so-called EU Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC), a military force able to intervene in “non-permissive environments” anywhere in the world.

The RDC is to become fully operational by 2025 and commanded by an institution called the “EU Military Planning and Conduct Capability.” (The term “capability” is a politically correct substitute for “headquarters,” as in “military headquarters.”)

The push for Europe to achieve strategic autonomy from the United States is being spearheaded by Macron, who, as part of his reelection campaign, apparently hopes to replace former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the de facto leader of Europe.

The danger is that many of the pie-in-the-sky policy proposals in the Strategic Compass will divert and drain resources and finances from where they are actually needed: NATO.

A logical course of action would be for EU member states to honor past pledges to increase defense spending as part of their contribution to the transatlantic alliance. That, however, would fly in the face of the folie de grandeur — the delusions of grandeur — of European federalists who dream of transforming the EU into a geopolitical “great power.”

The European Union has published a new strategy aimed at transforming the 27-member bloc into an independent geopolitical actor on the world stage.

The long-awaited “Strategic Compass” lays out an ambitious ten-year plan for the EU to develop an autonomous European security architecture. The goal is “strategic autonomy” — the ability for the EU to act independently of, and as a counterweight to, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — in matters of defense and security.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18394/putin-misunderstood-rumsfeld

Putin began by calling it “special operations” so that he would not have to obtain the consent of the Russian Parliament (Duma) to wage war.

This may have been because he expected a quick victory and did not wish to share the glory with anyone.

Putin also refused to name a commander-in-chief of the forces unleashed against Ukraine.

But even if we go by conservative estimates based on Russian official leaks, Putin’s army has suffered a 20 percent loss in killed and wounded. This is twice the maximum accepted in classic military doctrines….

Apart from its political impact on the international order, the war that Russia has launched against Ukraine contains countless features that should interest military analysts and planners across the globe.

This is the first time since World War II that the Russian Army (formerly Soviet Red Army) is tested on the battlefield against a medium-sized adversary in a classical war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18385/russia-iran-axis-of-evil

Now Western security officials believe that Iran and Russia have struck a cooperation deal to work together to evade Western sanctions once a new nuclear deal has been agreed by the Biden administration.

Iran is known to have established a clandestine banking and finance system to handle tens of billions of dollars in annual trade banned under U.S.-led sanctions.

Iran, according to Western security officials, has offered to provide Russia with access to its illegal sanctions-busting network in return for Moscow’s support in getting a new nuclear deal in place.

Russia and Iran are in the process of negotiating a multi-billion dollar arms deal, including the purchase of Russian warplanes and submarines, and Moscow is keen that the deal will not be scuppered as a result of Western sanctions.

Following a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in China this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that Moscow would work with Tehran to take steps to evade Western sanctions, the RIA news agency reported.

Western security officials believe the outline of a sanctions-busting deal between Moscow and Tehran is already in place, with Iran promising not to enforce Western sanctions against Russia. As part of the deal, Iran has offered to use its existing evasion network to help Russia sell its oil on international markets once the nuclear deal is signed, and sanctions have been lifted against Tehran.

The imposition of these measures is certainly a long overdue recognition by the Biden administration that Iran is simply exploiting the nuclear negotiations to further its own regional ambitions. And the fact that Iran and Russia are now actively colluding to evade Western sanctions, thereby forming a new “axis of evil”, should finally persuade the White House to end once and for all its involvement in this gross act of diplomatic folly.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s ill-judged obsession with reviving the flawed nuclear deal with Iran, the world can soon look forward to the creation of a new “axis of evil” between Russia and Iran.

In recent months, as negotiations over reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal’s official title, have continued in Vienna, Western negotiators have expressed concern about the negative support Iran is receiving from Russia in the talks.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18384/china-takes-over-solomon-islands

China, after years of persistent commercial, diplomatic, and military efforts, is taking over the Pacific.

Beijing is moving from island group to island group, and soon the People’s Liberation Army will be in striking distance of Hawaii.

The five-year deal, subject to automatic renewals, will allow Beijing to use the islands to base its military and to do pretty much what the Chinese military wants.

If implemented to its full extent, the Framework Agreement will give China the ability to sever shipping lanes and air links connecting the U.S. with its treaty ally Australia and partner New Zealand.

For decades, Washington allowed Canberra and Wellington to manage the Solomons and its region…. Beijing, through payoffs now detailed in public, essentially owns Sogavare’s government.

There is now talk that China will ink a security agreement with Papua New Guinea, just north of Australia.

Moreover, China wants to upgrade an airstrip in Kiribati. Beijing says the improvements are for civilian purposes only, yet the military uses are apparent and no one believes the Chinese assurances.

The facility is just 1,900 miles south of Hawaii. In Pacific terms, Kiribati is America’s next-door neighbor.

On March 25, the Solomon Islands announced it was “expanding” security arrangements, “diversifying the country’s security partnership including with China.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/nato-needs-reset-bruce-thornton/

Last week Joe Biden and his foreign policy team attended the NATO Heads of State and Government summit in Brussels. This gathering was more consequential than usual given the ongoing brutal war Russia is waging against Ukraine. Though Ukraine is not a member of NATO, this conflict on the borders of several NATO nations highlights the long-evident dysfunctions of the treaty, some of which are only now being acknowledged.

Yet little went on last week to suggest that NATO member-states are serious about making the deep reforms that should have taken place in the decade after the Cold War ended.

The official NATO statement was certainly filled with “rules-based international order” clichés typical of large bureaucracies suffering from professional deformation and fossilized narratives. It spoke of Russia’s “assault on international norms” that don’t exist, any more than the “international community” it implies will “hold accountable those responsible for violations of humanitarian and international law, including war crimes.” No more substantial are phrases like the “values and norms that have brought security and prosperity”; or “the foundations of international security and stability”; or the “international order including the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, as enshrined in the UN Charter.”

In reality, all these laws, institutions, and principles are the result of treaties made among sovereign nations that join them not because of shared “norms” or “values,” but because they serve those nations’ interests. And when a treaty stops doing so, those nations will ignore or violate them. That fact of history calls into doubt the statement’s claim that “Our commitment to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty is iron-clad.”