RUTHFULLY YOURS

North Korea will remain an outlaw until China wholeheartedly joins the international effort aimed at bringing Kim Jong-un to heel — a commitment it has made but of which we are yet to see hard evidence. That might change for the better were the US to endorse a nuclear-armed Japan.

How do we deal with North Korea? This is the perennial question, going back to the last decade of the twentieth century. In response to recurring posturing by Pyongyang, successive US administrations have concluded so-called agreements with the rogue state, facilitating aid in return for the regime promising to suspend its nuclear program. As should have been expected, such agreements have proved worthless. Both Kim Jong-il and his son, Kim Jong-un were emboldened and the result is a greatly enhanced and a possibly irreversible nuclear shield.

How often do you hear repeated the popular mantra that Kim Jong-un is a madman likely to start a nuclear war any moment, that he is prepared to risk self-destruction in a final gotterdammerung? Yet, whilst Islamic totalitarians may welcome death in exchange for paradis and 72 virgins, Kim Jong-un, like the communist totalitarians of the twentieth century, is only interested in a socialist paradise in the here and now. Like Stalin and Mao, he is a survivalist. His ideology is evil and insane but in terms of regime survival, Kim Jong-un is tactically rational. Playing the irrational madman is one of the oldest tricks in the totalitarian rule book, designed to keep adversaries in a permanent state of uncertainty.

Far more likely is that the possession of nuclear weapons is the last line of defence for North Korea. For all the belligerent talk, it would seem unlikely that any rocket fired from North Korea would strike the territory of any adversary, except by accident. Firing missiles directly over Japan, as he did this week, cements the madman image and strategy. The prime aim of Kim Jong-un is to sustain his evil regime and profitably exchange nuclear technology with other thug states around the world.

What is China’s role in this current crisis? There is much, possibly misplaced, hope that China might be induced to effectively restrain North Korea. Whilst China joined in the unanimous UN Security Council resolution, tightening economic sanctions against North Korea, we await clear evidence that China is fully abiding by its commitment. In any case, there is little evidence the sanctions will slow Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Instead, the regime, accompanied by xenophobic propaganda, will make the condition of much of the expendable populace even worse. China may be content to play the good cop, bad cop routine, happy to keep the United States and her allies permanently distracted by Kim Jong-un’s antics. I suspect that China would like to see the United States engaged forever and a day in futile efforts to negotiate some sort of settlement.

The U.S. military on Wednesday carried out two airstrikes aimed at stopping hundreds of Islamic State militants evacuated from the Lebanese-Syrian border from relocating to an extremist stronghold in Syria near the border with Iraq.

The first of the airstrikes came shortly after the U.S. criticized a deal brokered by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah that allowed hundreds of Islamic State militants and their families free passage out of an area straddling Syria’s southwestern border with Lebanon. Their convoy left Monday and was headed to a part of eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzour province very close to the border with U.S. ally Iraq.
Syrian forces members standing on a tank next to a bus waiting to transport Islamic State fighters and their families on Monday. Photo: Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

“We created a crater. It was to block them so they could not continue on the road,” a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday, adding the coalition didn’t strike the buses because family members were present.

That airstrike, which also destroyed a bridge, took place after the convoy entered Deir Ezzour province, one of Islamic State’s last strongholds in Syria, from territory controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. Central Command said that within two hours of the first strike, it conducted a separate but related second strike west of Deir Ezzour on a handful of logistical vehicles that were known to be affiliated to Islamic State. That strike may have killed Islamic State fighters, the U.S. military said.

“Irreconcilable #ISIS terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not bused across #Syria to the Iraqi border without #Iraq’s consent,” Brett McGurk, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for combating Islamic State, tweeted ahead of the airstrike. “Our @coalition will help ensure that these terrorists can never enter #Iraq or escape from what remains of their dwindling ‘caliphate.’”

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also criticized the Hezbollah deal.

“We consider it an insult to the Iraqi people. Moving this number of terrorists for such a long distance through Syria is unacceptable,” Mr. Abadi told reporters on Tuesday night. “We are fighting terrorism in Iraq and we are killing them in Iraq. We don’t send them to Syria.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Residents of northern Japan awoke Tuesday to sirens and cellphone warnings to take cover as a North Korean rocket flew overhead. The intermediate-range missile test will further roil the politics of security in Northeast Asia and is another prod toward Japan acquiring its own nuclear deterrent.

Pyongyang tested long-range missiles over Japan in 1998 and 2009, claiming they were satellite launches. The first shocked Japanese and led to cooperation with the U.S. on theater missile defense. After the second, Tokyo curtailed the North’s funding sources within Japan’s ethnic Korean community. Tuesday’s launch is even more threatening because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies assess that North Korea now has the ability to hit Japan with a miniaturized nuclear warhead mounted on a missile.

Much of Japan is protected by its own missile defenses as well as systems operated by U.S. forces in the region. Japan also recently deployed four Patriot PAC-3 missile-defense batteries to the west of the country, but these didn’t cover the northern island of Hokkaido overflown by Tuesday’s missile.

Japan’s ultimate security is the U.S. defense and nuclear umbrella, with its treaty guarantee that the U.S. will respond if Japan is attacked. But the logic of deterrence depends on having a rational actor as an adversary, and rationality can’t be guaranteed in North Korea. Its recent development of an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland also changes the equation. If North Korea attacked Tokyo and the U.S. responded with an attack on Pyongyang, U.S. cities might then be endangered.

Japanese leaders have long resisted building their own nuclear arsenal, but that could change if they conclude America isn’t reliable in a crisis. Or Japanese may simply decide they can’t have their survival depend on even a faithful ally’s judgment. Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent. And while public opinion currently opposes nuclear weapons, fear could change minds. Japan has enough plutonium from its civilian nuclear reactors for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and it has the know-how to build them in months.

This prospect should alarm China, which would suddenly face a nuclear-armed regional rival. The U.S. also has a strong interest in preventing a nuclear Japan, not least because South Korea might soon follow. East Asia would join the Middle East in a new era of nuclear proliferation, with grave risks to world order. This is one reason that acquiescing to a North Korea with nuclear missiles is so dangerous.

Born in Norway to Pakistani parents, Abid Q. Raja studied law, criminology, and psychology at the universities of Oslo, Southampton, and Oxford, and later worked in Norway at several law firms, the Immigration Appeals Board, and the Police Department’s Immigration Office. He was also active in groups with names like the Center against Ethnic Discrimination, the Council for Crime Prevention, and the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Tribunal.

In 1999, Raja began to appear frequently on Norwegian TV and in the newspaper op-ed pages as a commentator on immigration and integration issue and as a spokesman for the nation’s Muslims. As it happens, that was the same year I moved to Norway, so I’ve followed his entire public career. During those early years, Raja came off as angry and radical. In 2004, while serving as a spokesman for an Oslo mosque called World Islamic Mission, he argued that the Norwegian government should pay to build a school in Pakistan for the children of Pakistani Muslims living in Norway. (Many Muslims in Europe send their kids to schools “back home” to prevent their Westernization.) In 2005, after a Norwegian court found a father and son guilty of forcing a family member to marry, Raja wrote an article for Aftenposten in which he insisted that not all arranged marriages are forced marriages. Some young people, he risibly maintained, “can’t manage to find their own spouse,” while some “don’t want to find their own spouse” and therefore ask their parents to do the job for them. Yeah, right.

In 2004, after a TV2 discussion program called Holmgang addressed the recent jihadist slaughter in Amsterdam of Islam critic Theo van Gogh, Raja went on the warpath, making several TV appearances in which he charged that the show’s host, Oddvar Stenstrøm, had “stigmatized” Muslims. (Stenstrøm reacted angrily to what he described as Raja’s “purely personal attacks” and outright lies: “In my nearly forty years as a journalist I’ve never experienced anything like it.”) Three years later, when Holmgang addressed the question of whether radical Islam represented a threat to Western values (99% of viewers said “yes”), Raja wrote a furious op-ed demanding that Stenstrøm be fired. It’s not clear what happened behind the scenes at TV2, but Stenstrøm was gone within a few months.

At some point – I don’t remember exactly when – I noticed that Raja had tamed his rhetoric. He was trying to sound reasonable, trying to come off as cool and reasoned. He even made the occasional, very carefully worded criticism of this or that aspect of the Muslim subculture. I didn’t believe for a second that he had actually changed his opinion about anything. As far as I was concerned, it was all an act. Raja, I surmised, was cynically modifying his image. The only question was: why? The answer seemed obvious: he wanted to pursue a political career. And he wouldn’t be satisfied with just being a member of Parliament, representing a mostly Muslim constituency: if that was all he was after, he wouldn’t have to undergo any kind of makeover.

No, this was a guy who was determined to go straight to the top. I had no doubt whatsoever that he could make it. He’s articulate and can put on the charm. He has an extremely slick, lawyerly way of fielding ticklish questions – not that the Norwegian media ever ask him ticklish questions. No, they fawn over him and give him protection, the way the U.S. media did with Obama. Given this – and given Raja’s high level of name recognition, the rapid rise in Norway’s Muslim population, and the number of Norwegian voters who are eager to prove at the ballot box that they’re not Islamophobes – he could eventually be a shoo-in. In short, when I looked at the newly made-over Raja, I realized I was looking at the man who someday might well become Norway’s first Muslim prime minister.

Indeed, Raja did end up pursuing a political career. He became active in the smallish Venstre (Liberal) Party, which loves two things: the environment and mass Muslim immigration. In 2009 he won an “alternate” seat in Parliament; the next year he founded Minotenk, a think tank devoted to “minority politics.” He said he wanted to be a “bridge-builder.”

Until Obama became president, I was invited every year to the Fourth of July garden party at the residence of the American ambassador to Norway. At one of the last parties I attended, I noticed a familiar figure in the middle of the crowd. It was Raja. He was surrounded by a circle of admirers, holding court, shaking hands, flashing a big smile. Clearly, this was a man on the make, a star on the ascendant.

It’s what? ten? no, eleven days since the attacks in Spain that left 14 people dead in Barcelona plus one woman in the nearby seaside town of Cambrils. For once there wasn’t even the pretense that this was a “lone wolf” terrorist. It was an extremely large cell, organized by an imam called Abdelbaki es Satty, who prematurely self-detonated the night before when he and his conspirators accidentally blew up the house they’d filled with TATP.

I thought these novel aspects might hold the attention of the media. The imam/cell leader would seem to belie the view of the US National Security Advisor H R McMaster that Muslim terrorists who commit terror in the name of Islam do so out of “ignorance” of their faith – a view so fiercely held by Mr McMaster that it has resulted in the systematic cleansing from the White House of all those who dissent therefrom. And had Imam es Satty managed to get the TATP into the back of the van the death toll would have been many times higher.

But he didn’t, so it wasn’t. And fifteen dead on a glamorous and glittering European boulevard at the height of the tourist season now barely rates a #JeSuisWhatever hashtag, never mind an all-star pop concert with an audience of sorrowful, tilty-headed locals promising that no matter how often you blow us up we won’t change – by, say, adopting a less tilty-headed and sorrowful expression. The imam’s plan – to destroy the spectacular landmark church of the Sagrada Família – is oddly similar to the plot of Brad Thor’s new thriller, Use of Force, where the equivalent Spanish target is the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Indeed, the imam’s van driver has the same name as Mr Thor’s key plotter: Younes. But what’s thrilling in a thriller in now just the humdrum background music of real life in the new Europe.

So Barcelona came and went before I had a chance to write about it. So did Finland. You don’t remember that one? No imams, no TATP. Just a lone stabber going full Allahu Akbar in a shopping mall in Turku. Two women dead, eight injured. As it happens, I was in Turku last year, driving up the west coast of Finland all the way to Kemi, a somewhat unprepossessing burg at the top of the Bay of Bothnia, where I’d had an extensive conversation, in the pedestrian shopping arcade, with an elderly “refugee” in a dingy dishdash. And I’d intended to write something about how absurd it was that clothing designed for the deserts of Araby was now a not unfamiliar sight in southern Lapland, in a town that’s more or less the last stop before Santa’s Grotto.

But ten stabbing victims in Finland barely makes the papers at all: Foot-of-page-27 “News in Brief” stuff. Just the umpteenth confused fellow acting out of “ignorance” of his religion. If only H R McMaster had become a bigshot ayatollah and opened a seminary in Qom or Cairo, all this “ignorance” could have been avoided.

There was more “ignorance” afoot in Europe last night. On the boulevard Émile Jacqmain in the heart of Brussels a Somali was shot dead after yelling “Allahu Akbar” and taking his machete to a bunch of soldiers, and Buckingham Palace was reported to be in “lockdown” after another guy with another machete and another cry of “Allahu Akbar” took on another security detail. As A A Milne put it:

They’re stabbing the guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Mahmoud went down to kill Alice…

Lest you detect a pattern of behavior here, the Palace perp is reported to be “a 26-year-old man from Luton”. The Brussels stabber is not from Luton. So no general conclusions can be drawn: It’s not like Charlottesville, where one Caucasian in an automobile is an indictment of the entirety of American history necessitating the demolition of Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore.

The Queen is older than almost all those around her, certainly older than her guards and the 26-year-old Lutonians lunging at them with machetes. And she must occasionally reflect that not so long ago one didn’t hear words like “machete” and “lockdown” in connection with Buckingham Palace: “baldachin”, “porte-cochère” certainly; but not “lockdown”. Yet, if such thoughts should rise unbidden in one’s mind, it is prudent to suppress them. Consider the cautionary tale of Sarah Champion, Member of Parliament for Rotherham and spokesperson for “Women and Equalities” in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Ms Champion penned a column for The Sun earlier this month:

Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

This is the first installment of a small RealClearWorld series on the crisis in Venezuela. The views expressed are the author’s own.

Left-wing commentators are struggling to come to grips with Venezuela’s economic collapse. In early August, Stanford University professor Terry Lynn Karl joined the chorus claiming that falling oil prices are the problem. It’s true that the price of oil fell from around $100 per barrel in 2014 to around $50 in 2017. But socialist policies exacerbated the oil crisis and created the poverty we see in Venezuela today.

Free market societies are less affected by falling commodity prices, in part because their wealth does not rely on raw materials. Hong Kong and Singapore are two of the wealthiest economies in the world, with a 2016 gross domestic product per capita of $57,676 and $84,821, respectively.

What turned these resource-barren spits of land into thriving metropolises, with bustling commerce and a prosperous middle class? Economic freedom. It takes an average of just two days to start a company in Hong Kong — three in Singapore. Singapore has one business per 350 people, which means competitive enterprises constantly vie for consumers’ money with innovations and excellent service. Both economies encourage investment and trade, which allows consumers and businesses to benefit from the wealth and ideas of other nations.

According to the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World: 2016 Annual Report,” Hong Kong and Singapore are the two most free economies on earth. As the Fraser economists note, “countries with institutions and policies more consistent with economic freedom have higher investment rates, more rapid economic growth, higher income levels, and a more rapid reduction in poverty rates.” Free markets encourage trade, entrepreneurship, and investment, which create wealth.

By contrast, the poorest economies in the world are characterized by oppressive government intervention. In 2014, the 40 least economically free nations had an average per capita GDP of $5,471 (in 2011 dollars). Compare that to $41,228 for the freest 40 nations. Abundant natural resources cannot make up for a lack of freedom. Iran has over 150 billion barrels of oil reserves but is one of the 10 least economically free nations in the world. Price controls and industry subsidies crippled their economy for decades, and the government strictly limits access to financing for business. Iran’s GDP per capita in 2014, before oil prices fell, was just $6,007.

In Venezuela’s case, a government takeover of the oil industry reduced supply, sowing the seeds of future impoverishment. The oil industry was nationalized in 1976, but, wary of the mismanagement and corruption of other nationalized oil companies like Pemex, Venezuela let Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) operate as a mostly private company with decision-making freedom and competent business managers.

When Hugo Chavez took power in 1999, he curtailed this freedom. Chavez closed Venezuela’s oil fields to foreign investment and stopped reinvesting oil proceeds in the company. He fired 18,000 workers at PDVSA, replacing professional oil employees with inept but politically loyal workers. Bids started taking months longer to complete as staff kept changing their technical specifications. Fatal accidents and fires became more common, because Chavez’ yes-men didn’t understand how to safely run an oil refinery. PDVSA middle managers required Rolex bribes to schedule meetings.

Chavez pushed for a natural gas pipeline from Venezuela to Brazil. According to Luis Giusti, who competently ran the pre-Chavez PDVSA, this would, “bring gas that does not exist to markets that do not exist.”

Predictably, oil production collapsed: The Washington Post notes that production fell 25 percent from 1999 to 2013. PDVSA made its decisions based on politics rather than the needs of consumers, and output plummeted as a result.

Had Chavez instead privatized the oil industry, Venezuela would have enjoyed more oil, delivered more efficiently, and would have suffered less waste and corruption. When China privatized its agriculture industry, agricultural yields increased. In a working paper for the World Bank, economists Sunita Kikeri and John Nellis explain that privatization improves performance. When private companies compete and innovate, they can reduce waste and more efficiently manage resources to create more value.