By • Frontiers of Freedom
According to Matthew 12:36, Jesus said: “And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself.” The absolutely unjustified, illegal and genocidal war of the Russian Federation against the sovereign state of Ukraine cannot hide the former’s uncompromising war with itself. Indeed, present-day Russia is being thoroughly devastated by all the accumulated evil demons of a millennium which have been born from the enduring despotism as well as the inherent barbarism of the violently uncivilized and uncultured core mentality of the Russian people. Moreover, the reality of the West’s enduring superiority over Russia’s historically underdeveloped state of affairs is again materialized in the former’s impressive unity against the antediluvian hatred of the Russian political elite toward the rest of the world. Literally, Russia’s abominable past is killing the present post-Soviet regime of President Putin. For this reason alone, the dead soldiers and civilians have more power over the despotic regime of the Kremlin than all of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with its awe-inspiring destructive powers.
Clearly, the disintegration of President Putin’s despotic regime was evident on May 9, 2022, by the scaled down parade and by his lackluster speech about the war and the purported heroism of his Potamkin military. This military might still achieve partial victories in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, but the costs of the war have further sharpened the deepening chasm between the West and Russia, between Russia and Ukraine, and between Russia and the rest of the world. The increased insubordination and brutality of military commanders and their soldiers, the use of illegal methods as killers in uniform have become heroes for the majority of Russians, and the pusillanimous cowardice of the badly trained conscripts, all point to the diminishing control of the President and his close circle over the mainstay of the regime.
In the economy, the burgeoning effects of the sanctions, the uncertainties of the duration and final outcome of the war, combined with the growing unemployment, will certainly lead to the loss of credibility of the regime. Judging by President Putin’s victory day speech, he and his administration are badly divided and even clueless about how to extricate themselves from their self-inflicted misery. Granted that there has been no shortage of able bureaucrats in the Central Bank of Russia and the ministries responsible for the economy, but they do not have the political power to change the ossified and obsolete parts of the existing corrupt structures. In this manner, President Putin and his entourage can only rely on the bastions of the regime, the collection of various police forces and the faltering military. Facing humiliation in the battlefield and marching toward an economic as well as financial abyss, President Putin’s despotic regime will be incapable of embracing reality in a constructive way. The power of reason will be defeated by the fear of collapse that, in turn, will prevent developing a strategy which could enable Russia to change course and finally begin progressing toward a normal political harmonization.
Where does all this leave President Putin and Russia? It leaves both in a bottomless vacuum filled with innumerable crises. It leaves him personally in an unenviable position of becoming the prisoner of his own fantasies and illusions. It leaves him, if the war does not go his way, in desperate denial and even nihilism. It leaves him no choice but to increase oppression by new concentration camps, inhumane prison conditions and execution squads against everybody who even slightly expresses doubts about his narcissistic as well as delusional course of Russia.
Himself possessed by the demons of the past, namely, the never existent greatness of Tsarist Russia, the misleadingly fallacious strength of the former Soviet Union and the foul semi-Christian doctrines of the official Russian Orthodox Church, President Putin does not comprehend his country’s actual place and importance regionally and globally.
Aiming at destroying the entire European political system in order to restore the so-called Soviet Empire, President Putin has signed his and his country’s death warrant. Surely, Ukraine is going to turn into Russia’s greatest disaster, because President Putin and his comrades do not have the wherewithal to make genuine peace. By stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the sovereignty of the formerly Soviet Republics, every illegal Russian military invasion will be nothing but a truce, by which every fleeting victory will only feed the Kremlin’s growing paranoia. In the twenty second year of his despotism, the 69-year-old president and his small group of like-minded advisors have lived too long in their own cocoons; not being able to grasp the ubiquitous depravity of the monster that their predecessors and they have created. Imprisoned in their own lies and deceptions, President Putin and his comrades will remain ruthless manipulators of their nuclear prowess without any redeeming principles.
Thus, devoid of the gift of seeing clearly the realities of the world, their lives will continue to be uncompromisingly hellish. In order to prevent the total breakdown of the international order and to accelerate the demise of this wicked despotism, all states must remain firmly united in their uncompromising resolve to stop once and for all this cancerous growth from destroying the world.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
From time immemorial, Hungary has been plagued by quintessentially feudal nepotistic corruption coupled with institutionalized inhumanity. This deeply entrenched national corruption as well as its wicked inhumanity have culminated in lawless immorality that has perverted the political, social, economic and cultural realms at every level of public and personal lives. In politics, corruption and immorality have been compounded by a uniquely Magyar (Hungarian) ethnic schizophrenia that, in turn, has led to “doublethink” and “doubletalk.” The over four decades of Soviet military occupation and dictatorial Communist rule between 1948 and 1990, have only exacerbated the wholesale corruption, egotistical inhumanity and ruthless immorality of the nation. When independence came in 1990, Hungarians as a whole were woefully unprepared to create a real representative democracy and a free market economy. In spite of the cautious westernization permitted under Janos Kadar, the eponymous head of Communist Hungary, the country still differed radically in its political, economic and financial institutions from the West and have been separated from the European Union by its status as an occupied state. Thus, in their mentality Hungarians have remained the children of the past Communist dictatorship.
Political power, especially in a dictatorship, is like honey. It attracts the most controlling and ruthless dimwits who remain rooted in the past, while falsely pretending to fully embrace the new ideas dictated by the overwhelmingly external circumstances. These newly emerging young Communists coalesced around Istvan Stumpf, the son in law of the then Interior Minister Istvan Horvath in the late 1980s. Among them were Viktor Orban and almost all of his closest associates in the current Hungarian government. Today, after having exercised a one-party dictatorship for twelve years, they have become exactly as authoritarian as their Communist parents and grandparents were. History teaches that when political and economic corruption becomes a way of life, the entire country suffers irreparable catastrophe. Drunk with absolute power, Viktor Orban’s FIDESZ party passed a new constitution on April 18, 2011. With this unilateral act, the restoration of the one-party dictatorship has commenced. After ten self-serving amendments to this constitution, Viktor Orban has cemented the death of democracy, the rule of law, and the inability of the opposition to win elections by adhering to the hypocritical political processes of the ruling party.
The well-documented fact that Viktor Orban’s and his crime syndicate’s greed knows no limits has been demonstrated by the many government projects that are nothing but corrupt schemes to enrich himself, his extended family and a very small circle of boyhood friends, collectively referred to by the folkish black humor “the Knights of the System of National Cooperation.” Among the most glaringly corrupt government projects are the Budapest-Belgrade railway line, the upgrading and the expansion of Hungary’s only nuclear power plant in Paks, the by now infamous Microsoft scandal, the planned construction of the campus for the Chinese Fudan University, the reorganization of public universities into private foundations, which are controlled by Viktor Orban’s strohmen, the establishment of unaccountable private foundations, again exclusively ran by his minions, and the utterly corrupt resettlement bonds, which are in reality government securities. The latter is codified by Law CCXX of 2012, as an amendment to the Law II of 2007, on the Entry and Stay of Citizens of Third States, mandates that permanent residency can be awarded to citizens of third countries whose entry and stay in Hungary is justified by his or her investments on the basis of national economic interests. While denying entry to asylum seekers from all over the world, an assortment of questionable characters from mostly Russia and China can buy their ways into the European Union by “legally” bribing Viktor Orban and his government. Coupled with a tangled web of innumerable offshore companies, these so-called national security projects are presenting and will continue to pose enduring existential threats to the security of NATO as well as the European Union, and the financial and economic stability of the continent. It goes without saying that Brussels has tried to investigate and punish this government sanctioned corruption – thus far with very limited success.
Clearly, as Moses advised his people in Deuteronomy 16:19, not to succumb to bribery, because doing so “blind the vision of the wise.” And herein is the supreme tragedy of today’s Hungary. The deadly virus of corruption has inflicted even those who supposedly have been charged with fighting theft, embezzlement, bribery, racketeering and money laundering. Corresponding to this abominable state of affairs, the Hungarian government, led by Viktor Orban, will continue to be unable to adapt itself to the core values and principles of the West. Absolute powers always dehumanize those who exercise them. Vested with tremendous political powers, Viktor Orban is convinced that he rules over instead of serving the Hungarian people. For this reason alone, he and his pitiable subjects will surely face the deadly political and economic consequences of their all pervasive national irresponsibility.
By • Hoover Institution
When confronted with the murderous policies of the Third Reich on the eastern front in the late summer of 1941, Winston Churchill stated: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” Three years later, the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin gave the crime the name of genocide. The powerful implications of that name descend like a dark cloud over the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine today.
Lemkin had studied law at University of Lviv in the early 1920s (Lviv, today part of western Ukraine, was then called Lwów and was within the borders of Poland). He practiced international law in Warsaw before fleeing to the United States after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Lemkin coined his famous term in a 1944 Carnegie Endowment publication: “The practices of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders [the Nazis] is called by the author ‘genocide,’ a term deriving from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide).” Lemkin knew Ukraine well; he was one of the first to identify the Holodomor (Killer Famine) of 1932–33 that killed some four million Ukrainians as a genocidal attempt on the part of Stalin’s regime to break the back of the Ukrainian nation.
Dedicated to establishing an international law that would proscribe genocide in the international system, Lemkin lobbied at the newly founded United Nations to pass a “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which it adopted unanimously on December 9, 1948. Here, genocide is identified as a series of acts—killing members of the group is the first mentioned—“committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” The emphasis here is firmly on the destruction of a “group, as such” and its ability to continue to function as a group. Among the other acts mentioned in the convention are: “causing bodily harm . . . to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births,” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Even the quickest review of the events of the past ten weeks in Ukraine makes it evident that the Genocide Convention applies at least in part to the Russian actions in the Kyiv region revealed after the withdrawal of their forces. We still are uncertain of the extent of genocidal acts in the coastal city of Mariupol, but the pounding of the city’s civilian population, the revelation of mass graves, the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of citizens to Russia, the role of “filtration camps” in Rostov-on-Don, and the alleged relocation of Ukrainian children indicate an assault on Ukrainian nationality as such, which would constitute genocide.
Both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Joseph Biden have accused the Russians of committing genocide in Ukraine. It is good they bring this up, if only to put Putin and the Russian elite on alert that they will be held accountable for their crimes. Certainly, the indications of genocide are there, even if the factual materials for a legal case have not yet been collected. One of the problems in coming to an unalloyed conclusion about genocide in Ukraine is that the evidence that has been released to the public is not conclusive and there is much we still do not know about the Russians’ actions and intentions. The war is far from over and the worst may be yet to come. Even at that, as we know from the bloodshed in Bosnia, evidence from mass graves can be turned up long after the actual fighting is over. Even in the case of the Holocaust, fresh evidence continues to be produced that can be used in cases against the few perpetrators still alive.
We know that the US Department of State is accumulating evidence against the Russians, as is the Ukrainian government, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and a host of international NGOs. Most important, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim A. A. Khan, was just in Ukraine, along with other investigators, reviewing and cataloguing the host of crimes committed by the Russians in Bucha, Irpin, and elsewhere. Most of these cases are linked to “war crimes” (willful killing, willful infliction of suffering, taking of hostages, etc.) and “crimes against humanity” (extermination, torture, rape and sexual slavery, enforced disappearance, etc.), both of which are also subject to ICC prosecution. The crime of aggressive war, for which Nazi leaders were tried and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, also falls within the purview of the ICC. But by statute, the court cannot pursue the particular case of aggressive war—in contrast to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—against a country (Russia is one, the United States is another) that does not formally recognize the court’s jurisdiction.
There is also the crucial criterion of the perpetrators’ intentions in assessing genocide. Do Putin and his coterie of political and military leaders seek to destroy the Ukrainians as a national group as such? There is considerable evidence in the public domain to support this assertion. Putin’s historical screed of July 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” and a series of his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks deny the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian nation and its historical legitimacy. For Putin, Zelenskyy and his government represent the interests of neo-Nazis and their American and European supporters. The goal of the Russian campaign in his view is the “denazification” and de-militarization of Ukraine. These statements are mimicked by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; former president and deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev; and other Kremlin leaders who refuse to take Ukrainian national identity seriously. In this view, anyone who asserts Ukrainian identity thus becomes an enemy.
Comments by some pro-Kremlin television commentators and journalists are even more blatantly genocidal. In an April 3, 2022, article released by Novosti, the semiofficial Russian news agency, the journalist Timofei Sergeitsev took a frightening step beyond Putin’s already baleful accusations of Ukrainian Nazism. He suggested that the bulk of the Ukrainian masses were “passive Nazis” and “accomplices of Nazism” and should be subjected to re-education. The Ukrainians’ desire for independence and a European path was nothing more, he states, than pure Nazism, or what he called “Ukronazism.” Margarita Simonyan, who heads up a Kremlin news group, inserted an even more toxic additive to this dangerous rhetoric: “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred, and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.” It is hard to believe any Kremlin propagandists, given their mendacity, but given the viewpoints of many Russians, the media have succeeded in dehumanizing and diminishing the Ukrainians as a people, one of the signposts of genocide.
The extent to which the rhetoric has been translated into actions has become terrifyingly apparent. Simonyan’s diatribe about Ukrainians’ readiness “to tear out the eyes of children” was reflected in the signature, “for the children,” that was painted on the missile that the Russians lobbed into the train station at Kramatorsk, killing, among others, at least five children. One of the constant themes of Russian propaganda in the breakaway Donbass region since 2014 is that Ukrainians are killing and maiming children, even committing genocide.
Russian soldiers stop Ukrainian civilians at road blockades and guard posts to search for “Nazis,” looking for nationalist tattoos on the men, in which case they are dragged off to be interrogated, tortured, and worse. All it takes is for someone to be identified as having fought in a nationalist formation or even simply to be a good, patriotic Ukrainian for the Russians to wreak vengeance. The torture, executions, mass burials, indications of abuse, beatings, and rape—the senseless shelling of civilians in their homes and on the roads—leads one to believe that many Russian soldiers have absorbed the “Ukrainians are Nazis” line that they have been fed by their government and officers. Even if they do not, they have no choice but to remain silent. Some desert or surrender readily, just as hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens have left their homeland for abroad, searching for respite from the Kremlin’s lying and oppression. But most stay at their posts and fight.
The war in Ukraine grinds on; genocide hangs in the air. Evidence is being collected by the day. Some Ukrainian jurists recommend that a trial of the perpetrators be arranged in Kharkiv, which was the site in December 1943 of the first trial of Nazi perpetrators for their crimes against civilians in World War II. Putting Putin and his coterie on trial for genocide would not be easy and it will not happen soon. It took years after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims for former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević to be brought to trial for genocide (Milošević died before a verdict could be rendered). The remaining Khmer Rouge leaders were brought to trial by the Cambodian tribunal only in 1997, almost two decades after they were responsible for killing more than a fifth of their population.
Like the war itself, the trials of its perpetrators will demand great patience and fortitude—above all, from the Ukrainians themselves.
By • Townhall
The U.S. Air Force now has 57 new, high tech refueling tankers with more in the proverbial pipeline to replace its aging fleet of Eisenhower-era tankers. While tankers don’t generally capture the headlines, without a capable tanker to do mid-air refueling, the reach of our military’s bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance planes are cut dramatically. Simply put, tankers allow America’s warfighters to stay in the air and on target longer and without making extra trips back to the home base to refuel. And the KC-46 is operating right now refueling military aircraft over Poland and Germany that are protecting NATO as war wages nearby in Ukraine. The modernized KC-46 tankers are the most capable on the planet, and are more fuel efficient and can deliver fuel to every single aircraft in our arsenal. That means they are better for the taxpayer, the environment, and the warfighter.
Our nation’s military leaders estimate that we will need about 480 tankers to entirely replace America’s aging fleet and meet our defensive needs. As with all military equipment, many years or even decades from now, we will likely replace the KC-46 tanker, just as we are now doing. However, for the fights of today and the generation to come, the KC-46 is the world’s most capable and robust tanker. It’s also cost-effective at a time when budgets are being spread thin.
Given what has happened in recent years, it is clear that we have a lot of pressing national security budgetary needs. We will need to expand our missile defense and deterrence capabilities and make sure we have the tools to deter Chinese and Russian aggression as well as deter rogue states like North Korea and Iran. In times like these, we can’t afford to waste billions of dollars to buy a less advanced foreign tanker, let alone the years of development and testing it will take to upgrade it to the capability of an aircraft we already own. Doing that would simply divert money from other pressing needs which would have the impact of endangering our nation — not protecting it.
Development of military hardware is an expensive and time consuming process. And adding a whole host of changes and upgrades to bring a foreign tanker up to U.S. military standards would be a major development program with all the same risks of the unknown and the unproven. If the Pentagon starts down that path on another tanker today, it likely won’t roll off the assembly line for close to a decade. By that time, the Air Force will be looking to next generation tankers that are unmanned, stealthy, and able to fly places a wide body aircraft never will. In the meantime, if the Pentagon wants new technology or capability built into the new KC-46, that can easily be done. l
Some Pentagon officials want to pursue a relationship with Airbus. That would be a mistake. Even as Russia wages war against Ukraine, threatens expanded war against the Western world, and even threatens nuclear escalation, Airbus continues to buy titanium from Russia. In contrast, U.S.-based Boeing has announced that it is ceasing Russian titanium buys.
But that’s not the only reason the U.S. should be wary of entering into business with Airbus. The company has a long history of scandal and corruption. In the United Kingdom, for example, investigations have exposed massive bribery scandals. French investigations have also uncovered evidence of corruption. Additionally, Airbus has paid billions in fines because it has engaged in bribery schemes around the globe.
Moreover, Airbus has cost Americans thousands of high-paying aerospace jobs by violating trade laws and trade agreements. It doesn’t make sense defensively or economically to outsource our high tech capabilities and make our nation more dependent upon unreliable and untrustworthy trading partners.
“Buy American” is a mantra being repeated far and wide by the White House and others, from newsrooms to manufacturers. It’s merits can be debated, but the reality is that it makes no sense at all to choose to make ourselves dependent upon other nations for the things we absolutely must have to survive in a dangerous world. For example, missile defense technology and national security technology must be 100% American.
The KC-46 tanker is the most capable in the world. It is new and in the coming years if it needs updates, it can be achieved at a minimal cost. There is simply no real benefit to our war fighters, our taxpayers, or our nation to start developing a foreign tanker, especially given the current global environment.
The U.S. has a lot of work to do in other areas of national security to ensure that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran pose no serious danger to our nation. When you consider all the facts, it becomes clear we need a new tanker built by Airbus like we need a gasoline powered turtleneck sweater.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
Hungary’s ninth most bizarre and absolutely unfair national elections took place on April 3, 2022. The first in 1990, was won by a group of the previous regime’s fellow travelers, who knew close to nothing about governing a country. The resulting collective disappointment brought back in 1994 the reform Communists of the 1980s. In 1998, the Viktor Orban-led Young Democrats (Hungarian acronyms: FIDESZ), formed a coalition government with the antediluvian Smallholders’ Party. In 2002, his government, riddled with incompetence and corruption, was unceremoniously booted out of power by a coalition of the politically still presentable reform Communists and an unruly collection of self-aggrandizing neoliberal titans. This unlikely coalition survived for another eight unsuccessful years, which included the worldwide economic crisis in 2008-2009. In 2010, the Young Democrats returned to power with 54% of the votes. Since then, headed by the indestructible Viktor Orban, the not so Young and definitely not Democrats have repeated the same act three more times, in 2014, in 2018, and very recently in 2022.
Regardless of Viktor Orban’s and his party’s wins, the overall situation in Hungary has remained unequivocally frightening. In spite of significant financial support by the European Union, the promised progress to democracy and a more equitable distribution of the national wealth has never materialized. Under Viktor Orban’s premiership, Hungary has been metamorphosed from a resentfully developing constitutional system into a ruthless criminal syndicate. Economically, almost 50% of Hungarians still cannot afford basic resources. Conversely, the constitutionally unrestrained and politically unaccountable Orban governments have stolen and embezzled most of the economic wealth of the country. In this manner, Hungary has again lost another decade in moving closer politically and economically to the developed member states of the European Union.
More importantly, Hungary has even regressed backward by Viktor Orban’s “Illiberal Democracy.” While he has never defined it unambiguously, life in Hungary has shown that this kind of a rogue regime means nothing but absolute power for him – made even more despicable by unbridled corruption as well as unconditional impunity for his extended family and his closest collaborators. In other words, behind the facade of “Illiberal Democracy” lurks the real Hungary, in which the mentality of centuries-old feudalistic order is mixed in a chaotic jumble with the loathsome reality of a well organized criminal syndicate. Mainly, Orban’s “Illiberal Democracy” must be rebranded as a viscerally evil “Kleptocracy.” Undoubtedly, it is highly destructive for a truly free society. Indeed, his kleptocratic “Illiberal Democracy” is the sworn enemy of real democracy and economic prosperity, because it is the mythical “Horn of Amalthea” and a genuine cornucopia of inexhaustible wealth for this Hungarian tyrant.
Foreign and domestic analyses before the elections were full of erroneous opinions regarding the present situation in Hungary. In the United States of America, leading media personalities have praised Viktor Orban and the overall conditions in Hungary. In particular, Tucker Carlson of Fox News Channel and Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, excelled in relentlessly spreading pro-Orban propaganda with outrageously fabricated reporting on the blessings of the latter’s “Illiberal Democracy,” equating it falsely with genuine democratic conservatism. Unsurprisingly, they have been unable to explain the uniquely Hungarian phenomenon of the majority’s strange behavior of repeatedly submitting themselves to a political power that keeps them in abject poverty as well as political slavery. However, anyone who desires to really comprehend the actual state of affairs, the mentality and the lives of the Hungarians should study Patty Hearst’s curious affair with the Symbionese Liberation Army of 1974.
As has been exhaustively chronicled by the media and Hollywood, the granddaughter of American media magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped on February 4, 1974. Brainwashed and abused, the 19-year old Patty Hearst joined the group to commit several armed robberies. Whether she was a victim of coercion or a converted criminal remained unresolved by her criminal trial. What is more important, however, is the undeniable fact of her impossible state of mind, namely, being simultaneously an initial victim and a duped collaborator of her submission. Her personal tragedy was straight up good versus evil.
Similarly, the majority of Hungarian and their ethnic kinfolks in the neighboring countries, consider themselves the innocent victims of the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty that decimated historic Hungary’s territory as well as its population. Predictably, they have attached great importance to the logic of good versus evil among themselves and in relation with their neighbors in the region. Thus, a nation inside and outside Hungary’s present national boundaries, has become divided against itself. Hatred, jealousy and desperation have taken hold of the Hungarian national consciousness. Collaboration with the evil “Illiberal Democracy” has been a life or death predicament for every Hungarian.
Yet, no country, no institution and no ideology can normally develop by constantly highlighting its miseries. Nor can the belief in unrealistic and fallacious historical narratives provide the people with real knowledge of themselves as well as the outside environment. This instability of the political realm has prevented the emergence of a new politics and perhaps a new conception as well as spirituality of being a Hungarian. For these reasons, Viktor Orban’s hate-filled fearmongering and divisive rhetoric might have been seen as a personal victory for him, but a tragic defeat for Hungary. Constitutionally, the new/old Orban government will be incapable of changing its corrupt ways. Understandably, such a state of affairs cannot continue much longer. Clinging to its self-defeating domestic and foreign policies, Hungary will not abandon its ambivalence and, therefore, it will remain an absurdly underdeveloped member of the European Union, in which the law of the jungle will always be superimposed on the rule of law. In the precious words of a late friend of mine, Istvan Gereben: “Hungary is and will remain for the foreseeable future a hopelessly lost cause for its long suffering citizens, the European Union and the rest of the world.”
By • The Federalist
Want proof that President Joe Biden’s open border policies are deadly? A Texas National Guard soldier tragically drowned in the Rio Grande River this week while trying to rescue illegal border crossers from the water.
“I can tell you that it has been very dangerous in this stretch of the river this week,” Fox News’s Bill Melugin reported. “We’ve seen three migrants drown this week alone.”
That news comes just weeks after a migrant woman died while trying to scale the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
It’s difficult to calculate just how many tragedies have occurred at the U.S.-Mexico border since the Biden administration issued an unofficial gag order to cut off the press from accessing data held by federal officials but open border policies have long proved deadly. In 2021, at least 650 migrants died during their attempts to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of them succumbed to heat exposure and drowning but others were killed by feuding Mexican cartels.
If the United States’ drug crisis, which is fueled by drug trafficking at the Southern border, wasn’t enough, the rise in deaths among illegal border crossers and now Americans proves that Biden’s open border policies are hurting people.
When Biden assumed office, he moved to eradicate many of the Trump administration’s border security policies such as the “Remain in Mexico” policy which required asylum seekers to await court decisions in Mexico, and immediately halted construction on the border wall. Now, Biden is working to dismantle Title 42, a policy designed to expedite the expulsion of illegal border crossers during the Covid-19 pandemic, and which border agencies were barely enforcing anyway.
Aside from the Biden administration’s official work to dismantle parameter protections, the president and his team essentially welcomed illegal immigrants into the U.S. by telling them they could come to the U.S. once an Obama-era catch and release system was reinstated.
The administration’s weak border rhetoric and policy changes opened the door for many previously hesitant aliens to illegally cross the border without the same level of fear of retribution they felt under the previous administration. Multiple illegal immigrants have admitted as much.
That’s why illegal immigration under Biden has skyrocketed and is only expected to get worse.
In March alone, border officials apprehended at least 221,303 migrants trying to illegally cross the border. That puts border officials on track to make more than two million arrests by the end of the 2022 fiscal year and endure even more tragic migrant and American deaths than last year.
By • The Washington Free Beacon
The Biden administration is ending missile tests against defunct spy satellites, making the United States the first world power to do so.
In a Monday speech at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Vice President Kamala Harris said the United States will no longer conduct the “dangerous” missile tests, which scatter debris in space that could threaten astronauts, weather and GPS satellites, and U.S. military interests.
The announcement comes after Russia in November destroyed a Soviet-era satellite with a missile, a decision Harris called “reckless” and “irresponsible.” The United States and China have not conducted a missile test in more than 10 years. About a dozen have been conducted since 1960 by the United States, China, India, and Russia.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a member of the House’s Armed Services Committee and Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said the decision “handicaps” the United States’ ability to “deter future conflicts.”
“While the Chinese Communist Party launches more into space than the rest of the world combined, the Biden administration has opted to diminish our space capabilities by banning anti-satellite missile tests,” Waltz said. “We deter future conflicts by showing the capabilities to confront and defeat our enemies, not by hoping the CCP and Russia will cease military tests after the United States does. The Biden administration should understand this decision only handicaps the United States and reverse course immediately.”
By • National Review
Iran won’t back down from its assassination campaign targeting former U.S. officials over the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, a top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said.
IRGC navy commander Alireza Tangsiri said that Iran would not accept a deal whereby the U.S. would lift terrorism sanctions in exchange for Iranian pledges to “give up on avenging Soleimani,” Reuters reported yesterday. Tangsiri, Reuters added, seemed to be speaking specifically about Iran’s demand that the U.S. remove the IRGC from its Foreign Terrorist Organization list, which bans members of the group from entering the U.S.
“This is pure fantasy. The Supreme Leader has emphasized the need for revenge and the Revolutionary Guards’ top commander has said that revenge is inevitable and that we will choose the time and place for it,” Tangsiri said.
When Iranian officials talk about avenging Soleimani’s death, they are understood to be referring to their efforts to kill Trump administration officials who planned the Soleimani operation.
Tangsiri’s comments are an indication that Tehran continues to take a hard line on its demands that the Biden administration lift the FTO designation — which has brought the talks in Geneva to a standstill.
They also demonstrate that Iran has no intention of backing down from its ongoing assassination plots, even if the Biden administration were to lift the FTO designation and return to the deal.
The Iranian government has made a number of threats targeting former U.S. officials over the Soleimani killing.
To mark the two-year anniversary of the strike in January, Iran placed 52 U.S. officials it said were involved in the Soleimani strike on a sanctions blacklist believed to double as a list of people to target for assassination. In another memorable instance that month, the country’s supreme leader even shared a video depicting Trump’s assassination on the Mar-a-Lago golf course.
Meanwhile, a number of former senior U.S. officials, including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, have reportedly been assigned security details beyond their government service. The intelligence community believes that Iranian agents are working to assassinate the two officials on U.S. soil, the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan reported last month.
The Biden administration’s response to these Iranian assassination threats, besides the protective details, has largely been symbolic.
Although national-security adviser Jake Sullivan issued a statement in January pledging to inflict “severe consequences” on Iran in response to any assassinations, the U.S. has not withdrawn from the nuclear negotiations in Vienna over the ongoing threats to former officials. Instead, the administration has continued to participate in the talks, despite Iran’s demands to remove the IRGC from the FTO list.
In fact, there’s reason to believe that the administration is holding back from taking steps that would name and shame Iranians involved in these assassination plots for fear of disrupting the nuclear talks.
Rogan reported that the Department of Justice possesses indictable evidence against at least two IRGC members who are working to recruit a U.S.-based assassin to kill Bolton. (While Rogan noted that the department may have opted for a sealed indictment, he called the possibility unlikely.)
Those efforts haven’t prompted the White House to scrap the nuclear talks, and neither have Tangsiri’s recent comments.
Even as a top Iranian commander doubled down on his country’s assassination threats, the Biden administration has opted for continued engagement toward an agreement that would undeniably empower the IRGC.
By • Hoover Institution
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reenergized the Trans-Atlantic alliance in a manner unthinkable just two years ago. President Donald Trump entered office in 2017 with a deeply skeptical view of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the role of the United States as the world’s policeman and guarantor of European and Pacific security. He deliberately kept vague his administration’s commitment to uphold Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which commits member states to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all of them and to take appropriate action “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
President Joe Biden entered office last year intent on reestablishing the credibility of the Trans-Atlantic alliance and reaffirming the U.S. commitment to NATO. Two weeks after taking the oath of office, Biden stated unequivocally that “America is back…we will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again, not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s. American leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy.” At the 31st summit of NATO leaders in June 2021, Biden reaffirmed the commitment of the United States to NATO, while alliance leaders highlighted the challenges posed by a strengthening China and resurging Russia.
Perhaps because they did not believe Russian President Vladimir Putin would go so far as to roll the iron dice and invade Ukraine, alliance leaders did not issue a declaratory statement, or create a “red line,” on what would happen if he actually did so. When as many as 200,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders and then invaded, Biden sent thousands of additional U.S. troops to Eastern Europe but explicitly stated that they would not enter Ukrainian territory to assist in the defense of that country. Biden, along with other NATO leaders, fashioned a set of responses to Russian aggression to include a commitment to “defend every inch of NATO territory,” severe economic sanctions (albeit not against Russian export to Europe of badly needed oil and gas), arming Ukraine with defensive weapons such as Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, diplomatically isolating Russia, and going after the assets of Russian oligarchs who benefitted from Putin’s rule. The response by Western leaders has been united and forceful, which undoubtedly surprised Putin, who viewed the West as weak and divided. Instead of making Russia great again, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made NATO essential again.
The modern idea of a united alliance of great powers intent on deterring conflict is a century old, an outgrowth of the catastrophic Great War that nearly destroyed Europe’s faith in Western civilization. In the aftermath of that titanic struggle, the Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles—French Premier Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson—agreed to create a League of Nations, an international body that would adjudicate and resolve international disputes, thus preventing a repeat of the seemingly accidental plunge into world war in 1914 and the resulting slaughter of a generation of youth in the trenches. The United States, however, never joined the League, with the U.S. Senate’s refusal to ratify the Treaty of Versailles resulting in the retreat of the United States into isolation in the Western Hemisphere, seemingly protected by two great oceans.
The League of Nations, nevertheless, appeared to hold promise. The Locarno Pact of 1925, which resolved Germany’s western borders, led to the inclusion of Germany into the League the following year with a permanent seat on the League Council. Nevertheless, the era of mutual security in Europe was short-lived. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 led to the subversion of the Versailles Treaty, which became a dead letter upon the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 by German forces. In Asia, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933 after a League commission found Japanese forces had illegally occupied Manchuria. An Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 led the League to invoke economic sanctions, but France and Great Britain rescinded their support early the next year and allowed Italy to annex its illegally confiscated African possession. The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, enacted three Neutrality Acts designed to prevent the United States from slipping into war as many believed it had done without much thought in 1917. Lacking widespread support for the hard decisions required to ensure collective security and without the support of the United States, the League withered and died with the onset of World War II.
The victory of the Grand Alliance in that second and even more cataclysmic worldwide conflict led to another and more successful attempt at establishing collective security. The United Nations charter was signed in San Francisco on June 25, 1945, with the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China holding permanent seats on the Security Council. The onset of the Cold War and the defeat of Nationalist forces in China, however, made consensus in that body difficult, with the lone exception of the Korean War, when a Soviet boycott of the United Nations in protest against Nationalist China maintaining its seat in the body enabled the United States to sponsor a resolution condemning the North Korean attack on South Korea and authorizing the use of force to repel the invading army. UN forces remain on guard along the 38th Parallel to this day.
Given the inability of the United Nations to maintain collective security, the United States and its European and North American allies established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 to provide for collective defense, to prevent the reemergence of militaristic governments in Western Europe, and to stimulate political integration of member states. Bilateral U.S. defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, and Australia likewise provided a degree of collective security in the Pacific. These defense pacts prevented the outbreak of global hostilities and provided security for the global commons, leading to a new era of globalization and massive economic growth.
NATO is arguably the most successful alliance in history. For forty years it deterred a Soviet attack on Western Europe and provided a defense umbrella under which Europe grew both peaceful and prosperous. Germany was allowed to rearm under NATO auspices, and by the 1980s NATO possessed significant conventional capabilities to accompany its nuclear deterrent forces. It more than achieved its purpose, according to Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, led some to question the necessity for or viability of the alliance. The breakup of Yugoslavia and the descent of Bosnia and Herzegovina into civil war eventually led to a NATO-sponsored intervention that halted the fighting and stabilized the Balkans. NATO’s purpose, it turned out, was what it had always been—to keep the European continent stable and at peace. After terrorists launched attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty was invoked for the first time ever, and NATO aircraft patrolled the skies over U.S. cities for a short time.
For more ambitious American and European policy makers, NATO was seen not as a relic of the Cold War past, but as an avenue to the future. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO sought a new purpose in expanding the zone of democracy in Europe. Several rounds of enlargement expanded NATO relentlessly to the east, until it ran into the Russian border. Although Russian leaders were powerless to stop the advance, they were as it turns out less than enthralled by the prospect of having the world’s most powerful military alliance on their doorstep.
In 2005 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in a speech to the Duma that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” Putin’s desire to make Russia great again by rebuilding its military capabilities, linking the former Soviet Socialist Republics with Moscow, and dominating what Russian leaders refer to as the “near abroad” was clear enough. Putin directed invasions of Chechnya in 1999 and Georgia in 2008, ordered the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and created puppet governments in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine after sparking a Ukrainian civil war in 2014. The purpose of the latter actions was to create “frozen conflicts” that would prevent NATO from admitting Georgia or Ukraine, as the alliance has never before embraced new members that had outstanding border disputes.
As the world discovered just a few weeks ago, these measures were insufficient to assuage Putin’s ambitions. He desired not just a neutered Ukraine, but a subservient one. Putin never reconciled himself to the ousting in 2014 of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Moscow government in a struggle over whether Ukraine would join the European Union, headquartered in Brussels, or the Eurasian Economic Union, headquartered in Moscow. Ukrainians overwhelmingly wanted to look west for their future and took to the streets in massive numbers to make their point. To Putin, the Maidan Revolution was a western-inspired coup that severed Ukraine from its rightful place as the largest entity in Russia’s orbit.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has smacked Western leaders over the head with a two by four of reality. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced an increase in defense spending in his country to more than 2 percent of GDP, a figure that would put Germany ahead of Russia in military spending and which shows how deeply unsettling the Ukraine War has been to one of the most pacifist nations in Europe. President Biden has also earmarked increased funding for the U.S. armed forces, requesting $813B for national defense in FY 2023, with additional increases in the out years. Other NATO countries are likely to follow suit and strengthen their militaries.
Of course, the world has seen this emphasis on defense and deterrence come and go before. After World War II the United States demobilized, only to reverse course and maintain sustained high levels of defense spending from the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 to the Gulf War of 1991. The peace dividend of the 1990s ended in 2001 with the crash of airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Europe’s peace dividend lasted longer, but with Russian tanks rolling onto the Ukrainian steppes, the Continent is rearming. The West is united in opposing Russian aggression and is willing to back up that position with substantial resources and diplomatic clout. This posture has its limits, mainly in Asia, where China is taking a muscular stance towards Taiwan and its neighbors in the South China Sea but maintains significant economic leverage over its trading partners to temper their responses. European nations have also yet to wean themselves off of Russian oil and gas, which places limits on their ability to deter Putin’s adventurism.
Unless the West can come together economically in a manner that complements their military prowess, the current state of unity might be fleeting. At stake is the future of globalization, the prospect of collective deterrence of state-sponsored aggression, and the fate of the world’s democracies. Western policy makers must act decisively to ensure the Free World remains strong and united, even as the iron dice roll across the Eurasian heartland.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
The annals of human history are filled with innumerable acts of barbarism and tyranny committed by ruthless warmongers, religious fanatics and their ethnically hate-filled genocidal followers. After the countless battery of heinous crimes committed by Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Japan’s Imperial Military before and during World War II, it was rightly expected that the light of humanism finally would emerge triumphant over the dark forces of Fascism, National Socialism, military Imperialism and the Soviet Union’s depraved utopian Communism. However, while Germany, Italy, Japan and their former allies completely renounced Imperialism, Fascism as well as National Socialism, Russia’s leaders have never abandoned their tyrannical and revanchist domestic as well as foreign policies to restore the putative “greatness” of the thoroughly discredited Soviet Union with its colonial empire. To wit, by the leaders of the newly minted Russian Federation, the terms Fascism, Nazism and Imperialism have been misused to emphasize their irreconcilable enmity and their fallacious use of the most strategic engagement in their quest for the restoration of the status quo ante – their uncompromising confrontation with the United States of America as well as the rest of the world.
Accordingly, from his original installation by former President Yeltsin as the new tyrant of the Russian Federation at the end of 1999, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has labored to recreate the Soviet Union under the old Tsarist ideology of Official Nationality. Composed of Pan Slavism, known also as transcendent Christian Orthodoxy; Autocracy, meaning the so-called governing elite’s tyrannical supremacy; and Nationality, depicted as the racial superiority of the Russian narodnost cum nation. Moreover, in his capacities as President and Prime Minister, Putin has been on a mission to reassure the Russian people that the Soviet Union’s disintegration was due to the hostile machinations of foreign powers, not to the internal and international weaknesses of the pseudo Communist empire. The empire was only gone temporarily, he concluded. The emergence of the Russian Federation, like the mythological Phoenix rising from the eternal fire, constitutes a victory, not a defeat, he stated. Finally, the resurrection of historical Russia is the clearest proof that the sufferings of the Russian nation will be reversed by him. Be patient and courageous, he intoned, and I will conquer Russia’s enemies and the world.
Concurrently, a succession of American presidents have labored under the assumption that the leaders of the Russian Federation desire to politically democratize and economically modernize their realm. The common characteristic of their views of Russia has been the utter lack of knowledge and understanding of Russian history, Russian culture and the mentality of the Russian people. Hence, President Clinton’s “peace dividend,” President George W. Bush’s “I looked the man in the eye” amateurish fallacy, President Obama’s vainglorious belief in his imaginary brain powers, President Trump’s faith in his “art of the deal” ability, and President Biden’s non-existent experience as well as almost zero knowledge of European and world history, have only contributed to the enhanced geostrategic confusion of the post-Soviet era.
As historians and politicians incessantly remind us, the histories of individual countries, regions and continents are interconnected. In general, they also note that the more things change the more they remain the same. Lastly, they bemoan the fact that the ever changing politics of the day usually negatively affect the appreciation of history. Yet, interconnection does not mean uniformity, advancement does not always signal progress, and politically tainted interpretation and reinterpretation of the past as well as the present do not necessarily result in positive transformation of nations and societies. Objectively, the histories of different countries that are interconnected have shown, more often than not, distinctly disparate interpretations of real as well as invented traditions, leaving their histories with substantive triviality which prevents these societies and nations from proceeding toward establishing complete democracies.
Russia’s war on Ukraine is an unrelievedly grim tale of both countries’ historical inability to overcome the past collapses of their antediluvian orders. The resulting political, intellectual, cultural and moral madness always led to extraordinary convolutions. Specifically, behind the demolition artist Putin there lurks the primitive, misinformed, exploited and wretched masses of the Russian people. Conversely, behind the increasingly heroic persona of Zelenskyy stands the combined force of the heterogeneous Ukrainian nation that in its overwhelming majority desires to move west from its traditional eastern roots.
Contrary to the superficial and thus erroneous impression of most politicians and media analysts, Putin has been a living enigma without a rational reason. Obsessed by his Russian inferiority complex and fear of Western intellectual and cultural superiority, Putin was awestruck by the alacrity of German reunification. These feelings of citizen Putin were compounded by the chaotic and violent events of the first decade of the newly minted Russian Federation under President Yeltsin. Thus, when appointed Prime Minister on August 9, 1999, his first act of revenge was his brutal military operation against the independence movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the Russian Federation. For Putin, the two-year war in Chechnya, dubbed the Second Chechen War, was also a crusade to prove that in Putin’s Russian Federation the right of self-determination of peoples and nations will not be tolerated. More importantly, he showed that the strongest nation in the region has no legal or moral responsibilities to respect international and domestic laws which it signed, such as the Peace Treaty of 1997 after the First Chechen War between 1994-1996. The 1999 war on Chechnya demonstrated that the mightier nation can murder indiscriminately, steal, rape and lie at will. The result was deep hatred toward Putin and everything Russian by those whom the former should have respected and treated as equal. Even more egregiously, Putin’s war against the Chechens was an unambiguous declaration that he does not recognize self-discipline as a guiding principle of any political order, be it domestic or international. By doing so, Putin made it crystal clear that as president he will be driven by ruthless and indiscriminate violence as well as horrible inhumanity. More than two decades later, in February 2022, he proved that his infinite barbarism knows no bounds, and that his lack of self-control could become suicidal.
His illegal war on Ukraine is only the first salvo in his relentless and uncompromising quest to establish a new world order. According to numerous statements by President Putin and his Foreign Minister Lavrov, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has been designed to put an end to the US-dominated international regime: “Our special military operation is meant to put an end to the unabashed expansion [of NATO] and the unabashed drive towards full domination by the US and its Western subjects on the world stage,” did the latter intone on Rossiya 24 news channel. Moreover: “This domination is built on gross violations of international law and under some rules, which they are now hyping so much and which they make up on a case-by-case basis.” Finally, he blasted the European Union’s foreign policy commissioner Josep Borrell thus: “When a diplomatic chief …says a certain conflict can only be resolved through military action…Well, it must be something personal. He either misspoke or spoke without thinking, making statements that nobody asked him to make. But it’s an outrageous remark.” In closing, he assured his interviewer that Russia wants a negotiated peace with Ukraine.
What hypocrisy? What outrage? What lies? Starting with the Kremlin’s declared objectives when the illegal invasion begun to “DeNazify” and to “teach Kyiv’s drug edicts” to implement the Minsk agreements signed in 2014 and 2015 respectively, and concluding with the demand that Kyiv recognize the illegal annexation of the Crimea as well as the fraudulent independence of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, the Kremlin has incessantly upped the ante against Ukraine. Most recently, President Putin has demanded that Kyiv officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join NATO and the European Union.
Clearly, President Putin’s goals are unattainable by peaceful means. His stated intention to reestablish the Soviet Union and beyond means wars that will rapidly multiply without ends in sight. Moreover, these wars will become so lengthy, so bloody and so costly, that they will surely destroy Russia and at least the neighboring countries. Finally, the attacks on the well established principles of international law, humanitarianism and reason, will elevate brute force and unlimited violence to the supreme principle of international relations. What President Putin really demands is the complete barbarization of the world through ubiquitous militarization. This demand, however, demonstrates that he lacks even a modicum of educated intellect to comprehend the realities of world politics. Most importantly, he is absolutely oblivious to the fact that wars for the sake of mindless destruction and which never end will lose their political efficacy. The world cannot allow itself to be led by a barbarian with sub-intelligence to total annihilation. Shockingly, the Biden administration has chosen from the beginning of the war Obama’s “leading from behind” approach. Personally, President Biden is mentally unfit to lead anything. He is a failed president who belongs to a mental institution rather than in the White House. In the presidency, his shuffling connotes stagnation and even walking backwards. In politics, this kind of glaring weakness exposes a politician to assault. Ignoring President Putin’s grand design will result in worldwide catastrophe. Unless Congress realizes that the world is at a crossroads and forces him to change course, the world will perish. The United States of America cannot be wrong a second time. For these reasons, if the United States of America will not lead the world and do not unite against President Putin’s barbarism, the Ukrainian genocide will become the beginning of the end for human civilization on this earth.
By • Newsmax
As the world watches in horror as Vladimir Putin’s Russia bombs civilian sites like maternity hospitals in Ukraine in an unprovoked attack of raw conquest, sanctions have been imposed on a number of Russian banks, individuals and businesses.
Many are increasingly talking about and espousing buying American; however, that conversation actually started long before now.
When China began to leverage its manufacturing base during the pandemic to disadvantage nations that questioned its role in developing and hiding information about the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that becoming dependent on an adversarial nation for basic needs is not a good strategy.
Having run off most of our medical manufacturing facilities from Puerto Rico turned out to be not only harmful to Puerto Ricans employed in those facilities, but it turned out to be bad for Americans everywhere.
The U.S. needed China, so it could sell us medicines and supplies that we no longer could make. This gave China power and leverage over us. Control they were and arequite happy to possess and use.
The conflict in Ukraine illustrates another important point.
Sending money to a vicious and ruthless dictator gives him the resources to employ unthinkable atrocities — like bombing women and children in a maternity hospital — and attempts to force free nations to accept a foreign dictator as their ruler.
Challenging times often give us a chance to develop and display character.
It’s often hardest to do the right thing when it carries a heavy cost.
That’s what makes a recent move by Boeing so interesting.
The company announced it has suspended buying titanium from Russia, one of the world’s largest suppliers of the commodity. There are currently no sanctions imposed on Russian titanium so Boeing is drawing a line in the sand and making a strong statement about where it stands.
Naturally, the move has not gone over well with Russia.
Titanium is an important metal in the aerospace industry because of its strength and lightweight characteristics. It’s as strong and hard as steel, but weighs about half as much.
Titanium has the added benefit of being highly resistant to corrosion.
If you want to build world-class jumbo jets, you must have titanium to do so.
Boeing decided that it would move forward without Russian titanium because putting money in Putin’s pocket would only help his efforts to destroy Ukraine, topple its democratically elected government, and oppress about 40 million Ukrainians.
In contrast to Boeing’s strong stance, Airbus has announced that it will continue to buy titanium from Russia. That says a lot about Airbus — and none of it’s good.
There is an appreciable history of questionable business practices at Airbus, prompting investigations in the United Kingdom, where the allegation is the breach of the Bribery Act of 2010.
Airbus has agreed to pay billions in fines because it settled accusations of bribery, regarding the purported obtainment of lucrative contracts in foreign countries. French and U.S. authorities have also found indications of alleged bribery involving Airbus and their agents in Russia and China.
The bottom line is Americans should think twice before doing business with Airbus, especially our government and military leaders.
Why should we trust the business with national security contracts?
Some argue we should trust Airbus, but that seems as naive as making yourself dependent upon China for critically important medicines in a pandemic.
America ought not be beholden to anyone for the things that it needs the most.
As Russia is a potential nuclear threat, it’s pretty clear that missile defense technology is a critical need and must be 100% American. And as fears loom about war and the long-term intentions of China and Russia, all of our national security technology must also be 100% American.
To make ourselves dependent on others — particularly those with a checkered past —makes zero sense.
If we send our national security capabilities and jobs overseas, we’ll assuredly regret it.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
The history of present-day Russia has been untypically idiosyncratic both in its schizophrenic mentality as well as in its discombobulated irrationality. Starting with the Varangian rule of Prince Oleg of Novgorod in 882, continuing with the Mongol invasion in 1237-1240, and culminating in the establishment of the Tsardom of Russia in 1547, the synthesis of Slavic-Byzantine-Mongolian heritage has given birth to the first pseudo Russian civilization, in which stark disagreements about what constitutes such a culture have never been solved with unambiguous clarity. In its civilizational cum cultural misery, Russia has remained completely isolated from Europe and Asia for two centuries. More importantly, from a political perspective, the Russian monarchy was evil from its inception. In this manner, national or individual liberties were never contemplated, let alone implemented, throughout Russia’s bloody history.
Then, around the late 17th century, the fourteenth child of Tsar Alexis, called Pyotr Alekseyevich, emerged first in 1682 as a co-ruler and in 1696 as the sole Sovereign of all Russia. Until his death in 1725, this monarch, known in the West as Peter the Great or Emperor Peter I, attempted by ruthless despotism to “Westernize” his realm. He built a military fashioned after the Western Empires, partially broke the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church over public education, and reorganized the administration. Latent and open opposition to his Western reforms resulted in an interregnum that lasted until 1762, when the second of his surviving daughters Catherine I was crowned.
From there on, Tsarist Russia was even more badly ruled. A succession of male and female despots were more preoccupied with navigating the cruel labyrinths of factional wars than dealing with Russia’s chronic domestic backwardness and international isolation. Even the long reign of Catherine II did not result in lasting reforms for the better. While having built cordial relationships with many of the great minds of her era and amassed tremendous powers, she was bound by emotional attractions, interests, and opinions, which she had to observe. Following the French Revolution, she turned against everything she helped to create. When she died in 1796, her mentally challenged son Paul mounted the throne. In March 1801, he was duly assassinated by the nobility led by the Count of Bennigsen.
His son Alexander was the product of a mentaly ill father and the grandson of a nymphomaniac. Accordingly, throughout his reign, he exhibited all the signs of mental impediments. His contradictory foreign policies throughout the Napoleonic wars earned him the contempt of Europe. At home, he oscillated between two extremes: despotism and liberalism. At the end, he became the proverbial bull in the China shop at the Vienna Congress as well as in Russia. His death on December 1, 1825, triggered the Decembrist Revolution against his successor, Nicholas I. Antagonist of both the throne as well as his brother’s flirtation with Western ideas, Nicholas I became a dreaded despot and the sworn enemy of free thought and reforms both at home and abroad. His successors were as incompetent and occasionally mentally deranged as most of the Tsars after Peter the Great.
Repeatedly humiliated by crashing military defeats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dead Russian soldiers killed the living political elite. The misnamed Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was nothing but a desperate attempt to save Imperial Russia from itself. Led by an exiled anti-Tsarist demagogue Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, who took full advantage of the disintegration of the monarchy during World War I, Russia was violently transformed into a terrorist state. Having wrapped himself and his movement into the ideological cloth of fuzzy Marxism, he laid the foundation with his hypocritical rhetoric to the future destruction of the Soviet Union through self-interested preaching of fallacious idealistic theories. Moreover, by mixing his views on class hatred with racism-stinged Pan Slavism, he established the future Soviet Union as a militaristic nation predisposed to unbending hostility, which stood in a state of perpetual war with the rest of the world. In the same vein, he instituted a degree of domestic terrorism that was unparalelled even under the despotism of Tsarist Russia. Finally, by promising a “new world order,” his thesis of “total war” destroyed humanistic values across the Red Army occupied lands, instead of bringing about the promised perfect world. Russia’s pseudo civilization was never about humanity. Essentially, international politics was divided between the Soviet Union cum Russia, and with few exceptions, the rest of the world.
No wonder that this bastard political fraud, which was further debased by the boundless terror of Stalinism, deflated any optimism regarding the future betterment of Soviet Communism cum Socialism. In 1991, the much glorified Soviet experiment ended in a catastrophic defeat and enormous global disarray following more than seven decades of obdurate refusal by the Kremlin to face reality. After a decade of chaotic interregnum, in April 2000, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became the head of state with virtually unlimited powers. The legislature was made the obedient instrument of the President. So was the judiciary. The declared objective of the President to turn Russia internationally into a positive player in Europe and beyond and to build a democratic society at home, came to a crushing end first in Georgia in 2008 and then, in quick succession in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022. The coming military defeat in Ukraine presages the future collapse of the Russian Federation too that points to a much deeper malaise, namely, the repeated failures to address the centuries-old conflict between Westernization and Pan Slavism in earnest. Putin’s restoration of Russia’s Asiatic despotism will remain, as in the past, incongruent with his efforts to unite Pan Slavism and Western values into a coherent set of political, economic, cultural and moral systems. Today, history again repeats itself. Freedom and Despotism, Individualism and Globalism are in a worldwide struggle for supremacy. To wit, in the middle of these proverbial red lines is the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
To state the truth as plainly as possible, President Putin is a mediocre product of this totalitarian and inhuman pseudo civilization cum culture. As by his countless predecessors, the question of right versus wrong has never entered his mind or his conscience. His miraculous epiphany from a cold blooded officer of the KGB stationed in the occupied eastern part of Germany to a deeply religious adherent of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose teachings represent a corrupted form of Christianity, attests to a morally and intellectually irredeemably corrupt character. Coupled with the corrupt, decadent and backward culture of the Russian Federation, he will never understand what democracy, individual freedom, opposition to despotism, and domestic as well as international principles of justice are all about. Moreover, having been led by the spirit of despotism throughout his professional career, he has never comprehended the distinction between elective leadership and coercive submission of his constituents. Finally, he has always been oblivious to the needs of the average Russian, because he has never respected the basic rules of justice and the most elementar values of human life.
While Russia’s history is replete with weak despots who appeared powerful on the surface, they all considered themselves to be the “Peter the Great” of a crooked course that attempted to combine reform and order. With the illegal invasion of Ukraine, President Putin has added to this fallacious domestic agenda the dictum of rebuilding Russia’s glory on the most extremely racist Pan Slavik tradition. In this sense, he has stated repeatedly that his Russia will be for or against the rest of the world according to his personal judgments and desires. His self-serving interpretation of history, in which his belief in a unifying policy of all Slavik people and beyond, supporting the creation of a Pan Slavik Empire out of a pot-pouri of “artificial” states such as Ukraine, has been bound to result in a catastrophically antagonistic foreign policy. This quest for the forced union of all Slavik nations as well as peoples has been designed from the beginning to destroy the existing international order that had triumphed over his predecessor Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.
Thus, when NATO, the European Union and President Zelenskiyy rejected his ultimatums, President Putin began to execute the illegal invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, his military marched into Ukraine. After initial military successes and amid chaotic fighting, the Russian military advances have stalled. The reasons are many but one argument stands out. In President Putin’s sickly mind the fundamental concepts of his despotic regime at home closely correlate with his basic ideas of Russia’s current foreign policy. Thus, President Putin has a choice to make – either he repudiates Russia’s historical despotism at home with his ridiculous ambition for the violent unification of all Slavs, which includes usurpation of the political processes abroad and all of his outlandish territorial aggrandizements, or he will bring about his demise and the total destruction of the Russian Federation. In other words, unless his barbaric shenanigans of political folly at home and abroad end, he will surely fail in all of his objectives. History will remember him as a loser of epic proportions. For all of these reasons, enduring peace in Europe and beyond is impossible unless President Putin and his inner circle in the Kremlin does comprehend that employing exclusively military force to advance Russia’s political objectives is transitory, while the destructive nature of race-based Pan Slavism will live on indefinitely. For NATO, the European Union and the rest of the freedom loving states the strategy must be obvious. President Putin’s narrow-minded and racist empirical political folly must be decisively rejected. In order to stop once and for all the Russian military menace to the world, the rest of the world must be united, determined and free of biased visions. Such a steady resolve will guard the decision makers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean from being duped by President Putin’s lies and evil rhetoric or, in the alternative, becoming the victims of unexpected circumstances. Finally, this united front cannot be allowed to be choked by squabbles and internal contradictions. The status quo ante in Eastern Europe must be restored in its fullest. Nothing less would assure the lasting peace and stability of the world.
The president has an unerring instinct to make problems worse
By • The Washington Free Beacon
“This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply into production,” President Biden said during his announcement Thursday that he would release more barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve than at any point in American history. His decision was also a concession. None of the policies Biden has enacted throughout his short presidency have alleviated the problems they were meant to solve. Quite the opposite: In practically every case, Biden has made things worse.
Energy? Killing the Keystone pipeline was one of the first things Biden did when he took office. In February, Biden delayed approval of new oil and gas leases. He continues to blame the increase in gas prices on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices began to rise early in Biden’s term. Biden scapegoats oil companies for sitting on profits, while he could be doing everything in his power to ramp up domestic production of available fuel sources—including nuclear.
The fallout from Putin’s war was bound to make energy scarce and thus more valuable. Biden could have lessened the pain on the American consumer by pursuing an all-of-the-above energy dominance policy from the start, and by reducing the size of the American Rescue Plan so that it didn’t contribute to inflation. He chose to ignore the warnings of economists such as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and followed his advisers who incorrectly predicted that inflation would be temporary. By turning to the Strategic Reserve, Biden is promoting a temporary fix while the long-term solutions are plain to see. He’s relied on similar gimmicks before. They haven’t worked.
Consider Biden’s immigration policy. He spent his early days as president tearing up President Trump’s agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries that forced asylum-seekers to stay in third-party nations while U.S. judges decided on their claims. The rush for the border was swift and ongoing. This week, Biden is expected to reverse a rule Trump enforced during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed border agents to repatriate illegal immigrants swiftly because of the public health emergency. Homeland Security officials tell the New York Times that because of Biden’s decision they are planning on unauthorized crossings to double from an already high level. Republicans must be giddy with anticipation at the coming headlines.
Immigration and the border were the first places where you saw erosion in Biden’s job approval numbers last spring. Now he’s about to do something that will undermine border security and his political standing, and for no discernible reason. The pandemic is not over. Border crossings aren’t falling. We know that Biden’s decision will attract additional illegal immigrants. Nothing about this policy makes sense.
Biden doesn’t make sense. His Europe trip was a substantive success but a stylistic failure. The Western alliance is holding. But the president gaffed his way across Eastern Europe—saying the West would respond “in kind” to a Russian chemical attack, denying the deterrent value of sanctions when his subordinates have said precisely the opposite, telling U.S. troops that they would see the horrors of war in Ukraine firsthand, then raising the possibility that America’s strategic goal is regime change in Russia. Then, when Fox’s Peter Doocy soberly asked him about these inadvisable statements, Biden denied that he had said anything problematic.
I happen to believe that the world would be a safer place if Vladimir Putin were out of power—that indeed one possible consequence of a Russian defeat in Ukraine is Putin’s demise. I also believe that presidents shouldn’t sound like me. They need to watch their public statements because, as we were reminded throughout the Trump administration, words matter. Biden’s sentiment in Warsaw was correct. His sense of timing was wrong. After all, you never get in trouble for what you don’t say. Biden’s problem is that he rarely lets his actions speak louder than his words. And the words are garbled.
People notice. They don’t like what they hear, they can’t stand what they see. The public verdict on Biden is grim. He has not benefited from a rally-around-the-flag effect. His approval rating continues to fall. He’s at 41 percent approval in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls. He fell under 40 percent approval in this week’s Marist poll. Republicans continue to lead the congressional generic ballot. Democrats recognize that the electoral battlefield has widened. Biden is running out of time to improve his standing. And he hasn’t demonstrated an ability to bounce back as president.
Biden entered office at a time of national emergency. He benefited from the public’s desire to see Donald Trump off the airwaves for the first time in years. He oversaw the successful implementation of the vaccination program Trump had started. The resilience of the American economy helped him too.
Then the situation went sideways. Biden’s problems started on the southern border, ramped up with the Delta variant of coronavirus, accelerated with inflation, spread with the debacle in Afghanistan, and haven’t abated since. His rallying of the West in support of Ukraine is laudable, but he still hasn’t done enough to help the Ukrainians and he keeps stumbling on his own message. His commitments to the left wing of his party keep him from embracing the center. And damaging leaks about the federal investigation into his son’s finances only will mount if Republicans take Congress in November.
Biden’s reliance on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is telling. This is a presidency that is running out of gas.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
Even before the absolutely illegal and sickeningly barbaric invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China as well as his predecessors have done their utmost to crank up their country’s excessively ambitious territorial demands vis-a-vis their neighbors. Accordingly, waving the red flag of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” President Xi has indulged himself in gross historical falsifications and the threat of nuclear armageddon, if his vision of China’s civilizational superiority and great power status are not accepted unconditionally by the rest of the world. This outlandish behavior, combined with President Putin’s increasingly insane demeanor, requires an uncompromising and firm resolve of the world community.
Most importantly, the world in general and the United States of America as well as its allies in particular must internalize the lessons from not preempting President Putin’ war on Ukraine. Mindlessly rushing to Moscow and trying to dissuade him from taking a violent course of action without a clear strategy of absolute deterrence, including the credible threat of indirect military intervention on behalf of Ukraine by NATO, was doomed to abysmal failure from the beginning. Courting President Putin only gave the appearance both domestically as well as internationally that he is on the right side of history, namely, that his fallacious grievances and blatant lies about the internal conditions in Ukraine are well justified. Moreover, begging him to change his mind and to be rational only projected the West’s predicted Marxian softness and decadence vis-a-vis the overwhelmingly mighty Russian Despot. In reality, however, Putin’s despotism is a weak political construct. In its core, it is woefully incompetent and irredimably corrupt. Regrettably, the same mistakes are being committed in the West’s dealings with President Xi’s politically equally incompetent and economically precariously corrupt People’s Republic of China.
As Russia’s illegitimate war against Ukraine has stalled and President Putin’s badly trained military is reduced to barbaric terrorism against civilians, President Xi’s excessively praised military is also weaker by degrees from its official presentations by the self-serving narratives of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucrats. An effective military cannot be created, let alone maintained, unless its fundamental principles are rooted in the political, economic and moral stability of the government. Since the People’s Republic of China’s political system has been based on the despotic reign of a succession of ruthless manipulators, oppression has always been an instrument of power that has been unleashed uncontrollably rather than moderated by reason. In this context, President Xi, like Mao Zedong, abhors proven political and cultural principles of the pre-Communist era and has only used them for the sake of deception. Accordingly, neither of them has been a realist – they both have been illusionary visionaries. For men like these, nothing is more annoying than realists who try, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, to curb them.
The results have been political leaders who are no longer pragmatists, namely, politically sane individuals. In this manner, their underlings are nothing but useful idiots who have been tasked with fortifying the unrealistic illusionary visions of their Leader de jour. Thus, the Chinese military mess has always been closely related to the regime’s manifold problems. While Mao’s ragged “people’s army” has destroyed the existing as well as the old regimes and superimposed on their ruins the “Dictatorship of the Peasants and Workers,” it was incapable of establishing a stable and peaceful administration to replace them. The product of all these vague aspirations and unrealistic visions is the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Because of its badly defined functions within the Chinese version of Asiatic despotism, the People’s Liberation Army has been more a tool of domestic power struggle and oppression than a military designed to carry out offensive objectives. When it did in 1969 in the Sino-Soviet border war, against Vietnam in 1979 in response to Vietnam’s military actions against the rule of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge, and the ongoing China-India border hostilities in Pangong Lake, in Ladakh as well as the Tibet Autonomous Region between 2020-2022, the Chinese military has done rather poorly. Its ranks filled with the male products of Mao’s “one child policy,” those pampered boys’ mental strength and physical endurance could not match the discipline of their enemies.
The common denominator in Presidents Putin’s and Xi’s policies is the desire to destroy the present order of the world in the belief that their successive creation would be better and more equitable. Yet, by now it is abundantly clear that Russia has remained as backward as it has been for centuries and China’s economy has been in steady decline since 2013, when President Xi first ascended to the pinnacle of political and military power. The case in point is Mr. Liu Ho’s recent desperate plea to foreign investors to stay with their Chinese investments, because there is nothing wrong with the Chinese economy. Mr. Liu, who is the most influential economic advisor to President Xi, has promised major government actions to stimulate the economy to perform better. However, a large dose of skepticism is in order. The structural miseries of the Chinese command economy could only be solved by opening up the political system and by allowing both domestic and foreign businesses to operate under legally transparent conditions – without political pressures and the systematic as well as institutionalized Chinese corruption. Russia’s war on Ukraine has not been born out of the belligerence of NATO or the “Fascist” and “Genocidal” nature of President Zelenskyy’s administration. It has been born – like all the previous wars of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union – of the political, economic, financial, cultural and moral disorder which this troubled country has been subjected to from its very inception in the middle of the 16th century. The Chinese state in its present reincarnation is not different from President Putin’s self-engineered internal chaos and coming international catastrophe. The fate of Hong Kong, the future of Taiwan, the completely illegal expansion of China in the South China Sea and beyond and the ubiquitous corruption accompanying China’s expansion across the globe, should be sufficient reasons to establish an uncompromising strategy against its wholesale attempts at global destruction. If the anti-Russian and anti-Chinese coalitions remain strong, the world will be saved again from the monsters of evil despotisms.
By • Victoria Advocate
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech to Congress last week may not have been the Churchillian moment people had hoped for, but it got the job done. He asked for what his country needed, plainly, simply, and without folding into a grand discourse on the responsibilities of the world’s democracies to keep it safe from fascism as the late, great British leader might have.
Zelenskyy’s remarks showed him to be a most practical man, leading a country under siege. He should get all he asked for, all of it and more. He won’t, because the Biden administration fails to accept that his fight is our fight, whether we like it or not.
Some in Congress insist on shying away from that reality as well, going so far as to shamefully vote against suspending normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus as one more punishment for the aggressive war of national interest being waged against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy can see what far too many policymakers and influencers in the United States cannot. As he explained to Congress, the Russian attack on Ukraine “is a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values. It threw tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, choosing our own future against our desire for happiness, against our national dreams, just like the same dreams you have, you Americans, just like anyone else in the United States.”
America has been called to the fight and must answer in the affirmative. Thus far, the Biden administration has been leading from the back, reluctant to place the United States in the center of the global stage where it belongs. To Zelenskyy’s requests, it responded with a firm, unforgivable “no.”
The sanctions were slow in coming and have not, contrary to what White House spokesman Jen Psaki’s boast crushed the Russian economy. The military aid most needed is blocked, by design and by bureaucratic inertia. Most importantly, because the national security establishment is more worried about what might come next if Putin were ousted, his country still has avenues available to trade with the rest of the world.
It doesn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t all that long ago when Democrats like Biden led a global effort to isolate a sovereign state over a domestic matter the rest of the civilized world considered an offense against God and man. How does the invasion of Ukraine not call for a boycott of Russia and its Balearian ally led by the United States any less vigorous than what America and the other freedom-loving peoples of the world did to bring the Republic of South Africa’s apartheid government to its knees? The time to wreck the Russian economy, to give an incentive for the Russian people to throw off their masters in pursuit of a genuine democratic system is at hand.
George Washington wisely warned against any involvement in messy foreign entanglements when America was a new nation needing time to find its feet. Wise advice at the time, it became increasingly dangerous as the nation grew in economic might and military power until isolationism proved very, very costly to overcome.
From Teddy Roosevelt to today, the United States has strutted boldly across the world stage, stealing the scene from every pretender to global leadership from the Kaiser to Stalin to Saddam Hussein.
We have expended American lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defend the right of people to live free. This time that is not being asked of us. Zelenskyy and his people have shown they can and will fight. Some even say they are winning. Fear of what Putin might do if he’s backed into a corner cannot be allowed to be the determinant of U.S. policy. Fight now or fight later. That’s the choice.
We found that out in 1917. And in 1941.
And in 1950. And at other times when the fascists on the left and right threatened freedom. Today is not much different except Zelenskyy is asking only for the tools needed, as Churchill famously said so many years ago “So we may finish the job.”
It’s up to America to make sure he gets them.
