Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a fuller essay by Professor Berman, “Leaving Socialism Behind: A Lesson From German History,” that is published by the Hoover Institution as part of a new initiative, Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism: The Human Prosperity Project.
The images of East Germans eagerly pouring into West Berlin on the night of November 9, 1989, have become symbols of the beginning of the end of the Cold War and, more specifically, evidence of the failure of communist rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) and its socialist economic system. Yet that historic moment was only the final dramatic high point in the long history of dissatisfaction with living conditions in the eastern territory of Germany, first occupied by the Red Army during the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and, four years later, established as the GDR when, in Winston Churchill’s words, the Iron Curtain fell across the continent.
Between the formal political division of Germany in 1949 and the final hardening of the border with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a constant population flow from east to west took place, a movement away from Soviet-style socialism and toward Western capitalism. East Germans stopped voting with their feet only when the construction of the Wall in Berlin made it impossible to leave; outside the capital, prohibitive barriers already had stretched across the whole country. Nonetheless, many continued to try to escape, and hundreds lost their lives, shot by border guards in brave attempts to “flee the republic,” as the crime was cynically designated.
To state the obvious: there are no similar accounts of throngs of westerners clamoring to enter East Germany. Between 1950 and 1989, the GDR’s population decreased from 18.4 million to 16.4 million, while that of West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) grew from 50 million to 62 million.1 This tally is an indisputable judgment on the failure of socialism. The GDR system was unable to persuade its population to remain willingly. Only the Wall and the rifles of the border guards prevented East Germans from departing.
Several distinct, if interrelated, factors contributed to the economic limitations of the GDR. As noted, it emerged from the Soviet Occupation Zone, and the Soviet Union’s treatment of its defeated wartime adversary was harsh. Extensive manufacturing capacity was systematically dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union, further undermining an industrial base already reduced through wartime destruction, although this phenomenon declined by the early 1950s. In contrast, West Germany was benefiting from the very different American occupation and the positive effects of the Marshall Plan. While the West German economy profited from access to the world economy, East German trade remained largely constrained to the Soviet bloc. In addition, from 1949 to 1961, the population flight to the west disproportionately involved middle-class and relatively wealthy East Germans, who took their skills and amplified capital flight. Each of these elements arguably put East German economic performance at a disadvantage.
Yet the primary difference between East German underperformance and the West German “economic miracle” involved the antithetical organization of the countries’ economic systems and the philosophical assumptions underpinning them. Jaap Sleifer writes:
The difference between the two systems may be characterized by the structure of ownership and the degree of centralization in decision-making. West Germany, as a capitalist country, mainly relies on private and individual ownership and control of the business enterprise, whereas in East Germany, as a socialist country, state enterprises were predominant. Regarding the degree of centralization, capitalism provides wide areas of discretion for freedom of individual choice, which leads to decentralization of economic decisions, whereas socialism shows a more centralized approach towards economic decisions.2
The comparative performance of the East and West German economies therefore provides a nearly textbook case of the difference between socialist and capitalist economic paradigms. To be sure, other factors played a role, such as the countries’ differing treatments by occupation forces and the ongoing migration from east to west. Yet each of these two potentially mitigating circumstances was also simultaneously symptomatic of the opposed economic systems: the East German economy was disadvantaged precisely because the Soviet Union imposed its model of socialist planning, while the brain drain (and capital drain) to the west was a function of and response to the effects of the socialist model. In contrast to the imposition of the Soviet model—a derivative of the Marxist ideological legacy—in the GDR, West Germany benefited from the free market vision of thinkers such as Walter Eucken and Ludwig Erhard, who steered it toward its successful model of a social market economy: i.e., a capitalist economy tempered by a social safety net and restrictions on monopolies.
As a result, the contrast between East and West German economic performance became a set piece in representations of the Cold War. In 1960, Bellikoth Raghunath Shenoy, a prominent classical economist from India, provided a journalistic account of his visit to Berlin, not yet divided by the Wall, which included these trenchant observations:
The main thoroughfares of West Berlin are nearly jammed with prosperous-looking automobile traffic, the German make of cars, big and small, being much in evidence. Buses and trams dominate the thoroughfares in East Berlin; other automobiles, generally old and small cars, are in much smaller numbers than in West Berlin. One notices cars parked in front of workers’ quarters in West Berlin. The phenomenon of workers owning cars, which West Berlin shares with the USA and many parts of Europe, is unknown in East Berlin. In contrast with what one sees in West Berlin, the buildings here are generally grey from neglect, the furnishings lack in brightness and quality, and the roads and pavements are shabby, somewhat as in our [Indian] cities.3
He goes beyond economic observations to remark on the culture he sees:
Visiting East Berlin gives the impression of visiting a prison camp. The people do not seem to feel free. In striking contrast with the cordiality of West Berliners, they show an unwillingness to talk to strangers, generally taking shelter behind the plea that they do not understand English. At frequent intervals one comes across on the pavements uniformed police and military strutting along. Apart from the white armed traffic police and the police in the routine patrol cars, uniformed men are rarely seen on West Berlin roads.4
Evidently more is at stake than contrasting consumer cultures or access to privately owned cars. East Berlin is, in Shenoy’s view, symptomatic of a repressive society in which the inhabitants fear authority and shy away from contact with outsiders lest they draw attention to themselves:
The main explanation lies in the divergent political systems. The people being the same, there is no difference in talent, technological skill, and aspirations of the residents of the two parts of the city. In West Berlin efforts are spontaneous and self-directed by free men, under the urge to go ahead. In East Berlin effort is centrally directed by Communist planners. . . . The contrast in prosperity is convincing proof of the superiority of the forces of freedom over centralized planning.
The Perils of Selective Memory
Today it is especially important to remember both objective economic differences between the two Germanies and these subjective experiences: i.e., the dynamic excitement Shenoy felt in the west as opposed to the timidity of the east. Preserving these insights is vital because of current attempts to idealize socialism retrospectively by pointing to allegedly positive aspects of the East German performance.
While socialist-era statistics are notoriously unreliable, it is likely that East German standards of living were in fact consistently the highest in the Eastern bloc: i.e., better than in the other satellite states and certainly superior to the Soviet Union. Yet that hardly proves the success of GDR socialism; Germany long had been wealthier than its eastern neighbors. GDR standards of living also reflected the political pressure on East German leadership to attempt to keep up with the standard of living in the west, of which the East German population was well aware. This constant comparison with the Federal Republic is one unique feature of East German socialism; Poland never had to compete with a West Poland, or Hungary with a West Hungary. Yet artificially propping up the standard of living in East Germany contributed to the indebtedness of the state and its ultimate fragility, and, in any case, the GDR’s living standards never came close to matching what West Germans grew to expect. East Germany’s per-capita GDP has been measured at only 56 percent of GDP in the west.5
Nonetheless, one can hear apologists for the GDR and its socialist system argue that the East German state provided social goods such as extensive child care, correlating to a relatively higher degree of participation by women in the workforce. In post-unification debates, such features are sometimes taken as evidence of the accomplishments of the GDR. Yet in fact they represent instances of making a virtue out of necessity: in light of migration to the west and the dwindling population, raising labor force participation through the inclusion of women became unavoidable.
Such retrospective considerations arise from rosy false memories in the context of post-unification reality. The past may look attractive to those who do not have to relive it. Yet there is in fact no evidence of any significant interest on the part of former GDR citizens in returning to the socialist regime. One can observe some dissatisfaction in the former East Germany with the character of the unification process for various reasons, including a perceived condescension on the part of West Germany. East Germans at times experience the western critique of the GDR as offensively triumphalist, and, worse, they believe that the western critique of the socialist system simultaneously belittles their own lives within the system. This dynamic can generate defensiveness on an individual level, but it rarely turns into a reactive identification with the former regime.
The abrupt transformation of life through the unification of 1990, the economic disruption as East German enterprises collapsed, and the GDR’s sudden integration into a West German and, more broadly, cosmopolitan world has produced the phenomenon of Ostalgie, a nostalgia for the east. Sometimes it is expressed merely as a yearning for the (few) consumer products of one’s childhood, and sometimes it is a more complex psychological orientation toward a remembered youth in an allegedly simpler past. In Ostalgie discourse, the repressive aspects—the role of the Stasi, the secret police, the extensive surveillance network, the lack of a free press—are minimized or absent. The psychological appeal of Ostalgie—of succumbing to the glow of a wrongly remembered past—can be used by left-of-center politicians to conjure the illusion of a better past in order to advocate for statist policies in the present.
The failure of East German socialism to establish its legitimacy by maintaining the loyalty of its population—who, given the chance, evidently would have largely decamped to the west—was a matter of economics, but not only of economics. At stake was instead the broad infringement on human freedom that made life in the GDR undesirable. It is not only in terms of material prosperity that socialism fails.
“We Are the People”
Two pieces of literary and historical evidence testify to the indigenous flaws in the mindset of the East European satellite countries and especially the GDR, where patterns of subordination, obsequiousness, and obedience worked against the disruptive capacities of individuality, creativity, and spontaneity that drive change and growth. The “really existing socialism,” as it was labeled, held a systemic bias against the recognition of any signals that might allow for autocorrection. Infallibility and determinism, hallmarks of socialist thought, systematically eliminate opportunities to undertake modifications on the basis of experience.
The first piece of evidence is the poem “Song of the Party” (Lied der Partei), which became the anthem of the ruling Communist Party of the East Germany. It was written by German-Czech Communist poet Louis Fürnberg in 1949, and remembered particularly for its repeated line that conveys the core message “the Party is always right.”
The Party, the Party, it is always right!
And Comrades, may it stay that way;
For whoever fights for the right
Is always in the right.6
It conveys an unironic insistence on absolute obedience to the organization, which in turn is regarded as all-defining for the existence of its members. Worse, the song propagates a radical consequentialism: if one is fighting for the right, one is necessarily in the right—the end justifies the means. No room remains for any ethical limitation on the instruments one uses to reach a goal. As a document of the psychology and values of GDR socialism, “Song of the Party” helps explain the widespread suppression of individuality. Fürnberg’s ethos also displays the desiccation of political life that radical revolutionary writer Rosa Luxemburg foresaw years earlier as a result of the essence of the Bolshevik program and the socialist enterprise.7
The second piece of literary evidence comes in the summer of 1953, after spontaneous worker protests erupt across East Germany, reaching a high point on June 17 with strikes in all major industrial areas. The Soviet occupation forces suppress the uprising quickly, as protestors are shot and executions follow. Poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht responded to the suppression with a poem that has been repeatedly cited to show the mismatch between statist governance and democratic legitimation. In “The Solution” (Die Lösung), he describes the head of the Communist writers’ organization handing out flyers criticizing the workers for disappointing the government. Brecht’s laconic suggestion: the government should “dissolve the people and elect another.”8
The poem captures the distortion of political life inherent in East Germany, corroborating the prediction in Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks: that the hollowing-out of democracy and the elimination of rights, consistent with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s animosity to “civil society” and merely bourgeois liberty, produces dictatorship as the defining feature of socialism.
Such was Communist culture in the early years of the GDR. Later, just before the end of the socialist regime, matters had begun to change. There is evidence that servility and subordination were giving way to different personality types no longer consistent with authoritarian rule. “Sometimes this results in exaggerated anti-authoritarian behavioral patterns,” wrote Walter Friedrich, the director of the Youth Institute, in 1988. There also were expectations of greater freedom in personal lives and in relationships, such as “the demand for freedom in choosing a partner, and surely also the phenomenon of cohabitation and the high divorce rates here,” Friedrich wrote. “The greater demands by women, especially younger ones, for self-determination should also be regarded from this perspective—right up to feminist postulates.”9 He went on to report on how changes in personality characteristics were also leading to greater engagement in organizations such as church groups and the environmental movement. A protest potential was growing.
A year later, the East Germans were pushing their way into West Berlin. Even after the border opened, some continued to harbor illusions that the GDR might remain a separate state. Parts of the East German intelligentsia and cultural elite promoted this idea; after all, they had often benefited from relatively privileged positions. But in the voices of the demonstrators during the fall of 1989, especially in Leipzig, where a series of “Monday demonstrations” unfolded, and then in Berlin, an important transition took place. The crowds expressed aspirations to end not only the dictatorship but also eventually the division of Germany. Before the opening of the Wall, in October and early November, the demonstrators regularly chanted, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), asserting the democratic claim on popular sovereignty against a regime that had never achieved legitimacy through a free election. “We are the people” was, in effect, a call for a realization of the democracy that had been consistently denied by the dictatorial character of GDR socialism, precisely as Luxemburg had predicted would develop out of Lenin’s pattern of suppressing of elections and civil rights. As in Russia, so too in Germany.
On October 3, 1990, East Germany—or, more precisely, the five Länder in the territory of East Germany—joined the Federal Republic, leading to the formation of a single German state and the end of the post–World War II division. Whether this unification was inevitable is a matter of academic speculation at best. What one can say with certainty is that the specifically socialist character of the GDR—its poor economic performance and its constitutively repressive character that precluded political processes of democratic legitimation—made the continuity of an independent state deeply unappealing.
In the end, East Germans chose to abandon socialism to pursue greater prosperity and political freedom through integration into the liberal democracy and social market economy of the Federal Republic. There are few regrets.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court, and the future of American democracy
By • The Washington Free Beacon
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has clarified what is at stake in the 2020 election. It is not, as some believe, democracy itself. Nor is it, as others assume, our continued existence as a nation. Democracy will survive Donald Trump, and the United States of America will outlast Joe Biden. The question that 2020 will help to answer is what sort of democracy, and what sort of nation, America will be as it prepares to enter the second quarter of the 21st century.
The reaction to Ginsburg’s death, and to Republican plans to fill her seat on the Supreme Court, underscores the choice before the electorate: Does it prefer to live in a democratic republic ordered toward the principles of the Founders and the constitutional structure they designed to protect individual liberty? Or would it rather dwell in a plebiscitary democracy where the original meaning of the Constitution, when it is not explicitly repudiated, is politely overlooked in order to satisfy ever more radical egalitarian demands?
Needless to say, the answer is up in the air, and has been for some time. But we may be nearing a settlement, one way or another. The civil unrest of the past several months has made unignorable the existence of a large body of opinion that holds something is terribly wrong with America as founded, something that cannot be redeemed, and that American history and American institutions must be drastically revised to atone for the injustices committed against racial minorities. President Trump, in his inimitable way, has made the opposite argument, and called for a renewed appreciation of the American story and a resurgence of national pride.
Ginsburg’s passing heightened the tension. Suddenly an abstract cultural debate was transformed into a concrete political-legal struggle, and the prospect of lasting victory for one team (Trump and Mitch McConnell’s) looked real. The fight over the Supreme Court vacancy Ginsburg left behind also illuminated the lengths to which some progressives are prepared to go to make real their vision of the future. And it is in their openness to institutional upheaval that the real import of this election may be found. If enacted, the measures these Democrats propose would warp our constitutional system. They would turn the American government into a creature far different from the one the Founders made. This would be the upshot of the “structural reform” that, until the last week, lived mainly on Twitter and in the heads of policy wonks.
These Democrats say that, if President Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg is confirmed, and next year brings a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, then the first order of business for the new government, in the middle of a pandemic and a troubled economy, will be abolishing the legislative filibuster and packing the Supreme Court by adding anywhere from two to four justices. Such a move, which even the greatest president of the 20th century was unable to achieve, would polarize this country even more than it already is, and delegitimize the Court in the eyes of millions. But it is just the start of what some on the Democratic left would like to accomplish.
The Electoral College has been on the chopping block since 2000. If it goes the way of the dodo, presidential campaigns thereafter will be determined by who has the greatest allegiance in the biggest cities of the largest states. To override the supposed Republican advantage in the Senate, where every state enjoys equal representation, some progressives would grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and to Puerto Rico, and maybe Guam and American Samoa while they’re at it. These changes would make it much easier for Congress to eliminate private health insurance, enact universal vote by mail, “decarbonize” the economy, grant citizenship to illegal immigrants and voting rights to noncitizens, suppress political speech, resume taxpayer funding of abortion, and cross out the Second Amendment. The sheer number of bad ideas in play would be overwhelming.
Now it is true that at least the first item on this agenda would be debated according to the present rules. And the multiple veto points within the American kludgeocracy would no doubt interfere with, and sometimes upend, the boldest plans of the progressive Democrats. It is also the case that incorporating new states gives rise to challenges both constitutional (are we really willing to grant the remaining residents of the federal District of Columbia—the first family—three electoral votes?) as well as political (does Puerto Rico even want to be a state?). But the very fact that we are having this conversation at all—and that Biden, at this writing, has neither ruled out the court-packing scheme nor said whom he would nominate to the Court—ought seriously to worry defenders of the Founders’ Constitution.
In 1963, in the first chapter of The Conservative Affirmation, Willmoore Kendall offered his definition of American conservatism. Conservatives, Kendall wrote, oppose the “Liberal Revolution” that would replace representative government with majoritarian democracy:
Put an end, the Liberals insist, to ‘rural overrepresentation’ in the lower house of Congress and in the state legislatures—bringing them in line with the principle one-man one-equal-vote. And that principle, once adopted (it is French political philosophy, not American), must call finally for abolition even of the U.S. Senate as a check on majorities, and would in any case make the House the creature of numerical majorities at the polls. Abolish the electoral college, the Liberals insist further, and so make the President also the direct agent of the popular majority. Reform the party system, the liberals insist still further, so that each of our parties shall be programmatic, ideological—like those of the ‘real’ democracies in Europe—and that the two parties together shall submit, at election time, a genuine choice to the electorate. Abolish the filibuster—so runs the next point in the program—because it frustrates, serves no other function except to frustrate, the will of the majority. Rescind the seniority-principle in congressional committees, the program continues; it also obstructs the will of the majority. Now give the Liberal attackers their way on all these points, and the form of government explicated in the Federalist Papers will be no more.
That is what 2020 is about.
China has a plan to overtake the USA with a fused effort that combines trade with military expansion, as described in a new Pentagon report. It shows how China’s vaunted “One Belt, One Road” plan to build infrastructure worldwide is used for military advantage along with economic benefits.
Many signs show that China’s plan to overtake the U.S. is working. Sadly, most American media ignore this. Also sad is that some U.S. businesses would let China expand within our own borders, pushing out American companies from delivering goods domestically.
China’s navy is now larger than America’s, reports our Department of Defense. And China’s fleet of merchant vessels is larger by far.
The Chinese economy has grown to become second only to the U.S.—and it’s gaining on us. Some reports say China has already passed us in productivity. Other studies show China conducts significantly more world trade than America.
A Financial Times survey found that “China rules the waves.” Forbes reports that the United States has become “ridiculously dependent” on goods from China. The American Enterprise Institute pronounces “We’re too dependent on China for too many critical goods.”
A new report by the Center for International and Strategic Studies finds China “[dominates] the entire global maritime supply chain, [controls] the world’s second-largest shipping fleet . . . and [constructs] over a third of the world’s vessels” while also “producing 96% of the world’s shipping containers . . . and own[s] seven of the ten busiest ports in the world.”
China for years has been on what Forbes describes as a “seaport shopping spree . . . buying up the world’s ports” on every continent save Antarctica. The rationale is explained in the Pentagon’s brand-new paper, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.” It paints a fascinating picture of how China’s worldwide “One Belt, One Road” initiative is being used not only to benefit China’s seagoing trade, but also to establish footholds with great military value.
The new Defense Department report explains the dual nature of One Belt, One Road, which seeks to “fuse” trade and military purposes: “cultivating talent and blending military and civilian expertise and knowledge; building military requirements into civilian infrastructure and leveraging civilian construction for military purposes; and leveraging civilian service and logistics capabilities for military purposes.”
Estimates are that China is spending at least $150-billion each year on acquiring civil-military footholds at major chokepoints of world trade. Then they can attempt to deny passage by other nations, much as they now seek to do in the South China Sea.
So why would anybody invite China to expand its control into the domestic waters of the United States? Just as other nations have been paid handsomely to let China take over their shipping facilities, some American businesses believe they can save money by letting other countries (including government-subsidized Chinese entities) to transport goods between destinations within the United States.
Current U.S. law, known as the Jones Act, prohibits shipping goods or passengers between American ports (or along our rivers and canals) unless the vessel is built, owned and crewed by Americans. Those pushing to repeal the Jones Act would allow China to expand its power grab to extend into America’s borders.
And the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, recently pronounced China as a greater national security threat to the United States than any other nation, including working to influence and interfere in our elections.
The Frontiers of Freedom Foundation has a free paper online that explains the details of China’s plans to rule the waves. Even though major media refuse to sound the alarm about China’s ambitions, Americans can wake each other up and should start doing just that.
By defying conventional wisdom on the Middle East and China, he reshaped both political parties
By • The Washington Free Beacon
On Sept. 16 the editorial board of the New York Times did the impossible. It said something nice about President Trump. “The normalization of relations between Israel and two Arab states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is, on the face of it, a good and beneficial development,” the editors wrote. They even went so far as to say that the “Trump administration deserves credit for brokering it.” I had to read that sentence twice to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Perhaps the world really is ending.
Or perhaps the Times cannot avoid the reality that the “Abraham Accords” between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain are a historic achievement. It is the first advance toward peace in the Middle East since Israel signed a treaty with Jordan in 1994. By exposing the intransigence and corruption of the Palestinian authorities, and thereby removing them from the diplomatic equation, the Trump administration reestablished the “peace process” as a negotiation between states. And because the states in the region face a common foe—Iran—they have every incentive to band together. This is textbook realpolitik. The world is better off for it.
Just as remarkable as the deal itself is the bipartisan applause that greeted it in the United States. No one needs reminding that domestic politics is polarized and paranoid. Each party is convinced that the other one will extinguish democracy at the first opportunity. The past three presidencies have been jarringly discontinuous in style, temperament, and policy. But the same Democrats who sometimes appear eager to remove Donald Trump from office by any means necessary treated this foreign policy accomplishment with equanimity and acquiescence. “It is good to see others in the Middle East recognizing Israel and even welcoming it as a partner,” Biden said in a statement, adding that “a Biden-Harris administration will build on these steps.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware told Jewish Insider that the agreement is “a very positive thing.”
The irony is that Trump’s opponents are ready to accept this “very positive thing” despite warning against and objecting to the policies that contributed to it. Through his personal relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump reaffirmed that there is “no daylight” between the United States and Israel after an eight-year caesura. He defied conventional wisdom when he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, when he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, when he cut off aid to the Palestinians, when he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and when he ordered the lethal strike against Qassem Soleimani. But the catastrophes that the foreign policy establishment predicted would follow each of these measures never materialized. What emerged instead were the Abraham Accords and a growing alliance against Iran.
It is in the realm of foreign policy that Trump’s deviations from political norms have had the most positive and irreversible consequences. If he becomes president, Joe Biden may mistakenly try to revive the chances for Palestinian statehood by getting tough on the Israelis. He may attempt to resuscitate the moribund Iran deal. But it is highly doubtful that he will rescind the Abraham Accords, or withdraw recognition of Israel’s Golan sovereignty, or return the U.S. embassy to Tel Aviv. He won’t have the support for such decisions. And he won’t have any good reason to make them. Anyone who has read the news latelyunderstands that a strong and engaged Israel is good for security. Her enemies are our enemies.
By establishing inescapable facts on the ground over the ceaseless objections of critics, President Trump overrides the often meaningless verbiage that constitutes international diplomacy and ends up changing the very terms of the foreign policy conversation. Nowhere has this dynamic been clearer than in U.S. relations with China.
Beginning with his surprise call to Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen in December 2016 and continuing through his resumption of U.S. Navy freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea the following year, his tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018, his and his administration’s rhetorical barrage against China beginning in earnest in 2019, and culminating in his multiple actions against China this year, from limiting travel to canceling visas to forcing the sale of TikTok to tightening the vise on Huawei to selling an additional $7 billion in arms to Taiwan, Trump has reoriented America’s approach to the People’s Republic. No longer is China encouraged to be a “responsible stakeholder.” It is recognized as a great-power competitor.
Resistance to this proper understanding of China’s position in the international system remains strong. But it is unquestionably the case that both Republicans and Democrats are starting to see China more as a threat than a partner. And it is Donald Trump who is behind this clarification of vision. (Xi Jinping and the pandemic helped too.) Whatever a President Biden might do about China—and he seems far more interested in repairing our alliances in “Old Europe” than in tackling this paramount challenge of the 21st century—he would operate within the constraints Trump established and on the intellectual terrain Trump landscaped.ADVERTISING
There is no greater measure of presidential significance than a chief executive’s ability to transform not just his own but also the opposing party. When it comes to the Middle East and China, the Democrats are closer to Donald Trump today than they were at the outset of his term. That they find themselves in accordance with someone whom they despise is evidence of Trump’s ability to realign politics at home and abroad. This is no small feat.
Some might say it’s worthy of a prize.
State says it will accept ballots for 8 days after election, even without postmark
By • The Washington Free Beacon
Republicans are challenging a move by Minnesota election officials to allow ballots to be counted past Election Day even if they are not postmarked.
State representative Eric Lucero (R.) and Republican elector James Carson filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging secretary of state Steve Simon’s consent decree that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as late as eight days after Election Day with or without a postmark. The lawsuit argues the decree violates the U.S. Constitution by moving the ballot deadline without the authority of the state legislature and violates federal law by permitting “ballots with no post mark and no evidence of having been cast on November 3” to be counted.
“This means that persons in Minnesota may vote for days after Election Day and have their votes counted,” the lawsuit states. It also warns that the decree will likely lead to disputed results, disenfranchised voters, and may even cause the results of the vote in Minnesota to be rejected entirely.
The consent decree states that if a ballot is not postmarked, “the election official reviewing the ballot should presume that it was mailed on or before Election Day unless the preponderance demonstrates it was mailed after Election Day.” Simon described the seven-day window as “an automatic seven-day cushion” for Minnesota voters.
Simon’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the assumption that unmarked ballots were sent on or before Election Day.
The lawsuit was filed with the support of the Honest Elections Project, a nonpartisan election integrity group whose executive director Jason Snead told the Washington Free Beacon that the decree could incentivize illegal voting.
“You wind up with these ballots that arrive potentially many days after the election, they could be the decisive ballots. But there’s absolutely no proof that they were cast validly on Election Day,” Snead said. “And when you consider what’s at stake here, not only does that amplify the need for us to have clear outcomes, it also amplifies the incentive to try to gin up a few extra ballots after the fact if you see that your candidate is losing.”
“Even if that’s not going to happen, the mere fact that it is possible risks casting doubt on the result,” he said.
Minnesota is among 16 other states this year that permit mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted, including the battleground states of North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Texas. With the exception of West Virginia, which allows ballots without postmarks to be counted up to one day after the election, it is the only state to allow ballots without postmarks to be counted.
As the election nears, Republicans and Democrats have stepped up efforts to litigate state voting regulations. Lawsuits filed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, and Nevada have pitted the parties against one another in protracted fights over the use of ballot drop boxes, and ballot deadlines, as well as rules for collecting, processing, and counting ballots. Republicans have largely favored maintaining existing voting regulations within states, while Democrats have advocated expanding voting access and loosening regulations.
By • American Action News
Twitter, the social media giant that dominates online chatter, suspended Friday the account of the pro-ballot integrity group “True the Vote,” after alleging the group’s tweets about military ballots and voting deadlines violated the platform’s rules.
True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht responded angrily to the move, the latest in a series of actions by the media platform that have some accusing it of trying to stifle debate and the free flow of information during the election season to the detriment of conservative candidates and activists.
Twitter temporarily suspended the group’s account, according to a statement from Engelbrecht, after a Sept. 15 post that encouraged citizens and potential voters to confirm their counties were following the rules for mailing out ballots to members of the military serving in other states and overseas.
Twitter and other social media sites have in recent months announced new policies to protect against tampering by foreign nationals and security agencies seeking to affect the 2020 election. The increased supervision of posts began after congressional investigating committees and an inquiry overseen by former FBI Director Robert Mueller all concluded the Russians had penetrated U.S. social media platforms with misleading messages during the 2016 campaign. No evidence was ever produced, however, that demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow in these activities as many Democrats charged then and still maintain was the case.
Advocates for the military have for some time complained that ballots for local, state, and federal elections are often not mailed out early enough for soldiers, sailors, and Marines serving overseas to receive them, fill them out, and return them in time for them to be counted. Effectively, they say, this leaves America’s troops in the field – many of whom are presumed to vote Republican – disenfranchised.
“True the Vote, an election integrity advocacy organization, was sending out information of public interest regarding deadlines for our military voters, pursuant to the ‘Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment’ Act, federal law, which requires states to send absentee ballots to UOCAVA voters at least 45 days before federal elections,” Englebrecht said, adding that information “in no way” violated Twitter’s terms of service.
The now-controversial tweet was “retweeted” by President Donald J. Trump two days after it was initially posted, an act Engelbrecht suggested in a statement might have provoked the ire of Trump opponents inside Twitter supervising what goes up on the platform while searching for electoral disinformation.
True the Vote is appealing the sanction and said it fully expects to have its access to the site restored in short order. Officials at Twitter could not be reached for comment.
By • Newsweek
“Never forget.”
That’s what we all said nearly twenty years ago while struggling to cope with our grief. Since the days of George Washington, we’d thought of ourselves as more or less removed from what he called “messy, foreign entanglements,” protected from the rest of the world by two great oceans and divine providence.
We’d jumped into the thicket a time or two. America saved the world at least twice during the 20th century, probably three times given our willingness to contest an expensive, global Cold War which occasionally turned hot in places like Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East at the cost of our greatest treasure: the young men and women sent to fight.
Was it strange that we never asked to be thanked for it? No, that’s just the way we are. We want to live our lives in peace, left alone to make our own choices, secure in our liberties as God gave them to us. We flirted with the building of empires but that really wasn’t for us. We wanted to be, and often were, the good example for others to follow.
Then came 9/11. A group of religious fanatics hijacked four U.S.-flagged airliners, turning them into flying missiles aimed straight at the heart of our political and commercial institutions. Two of them hit New York’s Twin Towers with such explosive force the buildings crumbled to the ground as if they were made of sand.
A third jetliner reportedly headed for the White House crashed instead into the Pentagon. On the fourth plane, the passengers who’d learned what had happened on the other three revolted against their captors. The ensuing struggle meant their plane, instead of piercing the dome of the U.S. Capitol as planned, broke apart in a field in Pennsylvania.
“Never forget,” we said afterward. “Never forget the everyday Americans and the others from all walks of life who perished that day,” we said. “The people who represented the multitude of differences between Americans but were, for a brief moment, united by their humanity.”
“Never forget,” we said about the first responders from the police and fire departments and emergency techs in New York City, Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, and rural Pennsylvania who came to the aid of those injured, dying, or dead. Especially those who died that day because their jobs had them rushing into the burning buildings rather than out of them.
America, we forgot—and we should be ashamed.
Over the last decade, we’ve watched as the nation turned in on itself. First responders are being shunned, even assassinated. In California this past weekend, so-called peaceful protestors gathered outside the hospital where two Los Angeles County deputies who’d been ambushed were being treated, shouting their hopes the officers would die.
This didn’t start with Donald Trump. This didn’t start with Barack Obama. It started outside politics, in the American culture where somehow we’ve been divided up, piecemeal, into groups airing grievances. Left or right, it makes no difference. We’ve allowed ourselves to be pitted against one another, and we should be ashamed.
We’ve forgotten that in America each life matters. We’re all created equal, as individuals, not assigned at birth into groups because of skin color, economic status, education, or biological sex. We are an imperfect nation, to be sure, but almost certainly less imperfect than any other.
The fanatics responsible for the murder of more than 3,000 of our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers on that dark day nineteen years ago didn’t attack us in protest of the country’s history of systemic racism. Or because women get paid less on average than men. Or because some people think you should have to show a government-issued photo ID that proves you are who you say you are before you can exercise your right to vote. Pick any complaint you want; it isn’t why America was attacked.
We were attacked because, out of all the nations of the world, America stands for the idea that all men and women are by their birthright free and should be treated equally under the law. We were attacked because of our ideas about religious liberty—that different faiths can coexist respectfully and peacefully—and because we believe women have just as much right as men to pursue an education. And for many other reasons, all of which have to do with what is best about us, because of the ideas that make our civilization strong. We are one nation and, fundamentally, we all matter. In the heat of the moment, we’ve forgotten that. Yet rather than dwell much longer on our errors, let’s come together in our strengths to make this nation all it can be, for now and for generations to come.
By • American Action News
Many agree that the United States is fortunate that the soaring Bald Eagle was chosen over the lowly Turkey, proposed by Benjamin Franklin, as its national bird. It is majestic, powerful, swift, and deadly. But now, it has also accidentally proven to be a capable anti-drone weapons system.- Advertisement –
Last month, a Bald Eagle engaged and defeated a Michigan state government drone flying over the Great Lakes. The drone the eagle took down was ironically operated by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).
According to USA Today, the $950 drone was 162 feet above the waters of Lake Michigan mapping shoreline erosion when attacked by the Bald Eagle. The bird reportedly swooped in and ripped a propeller off the drone causing it to fall into lake 150 feet offshore.
Despite an exhaustive search, the downed drone was not found.
“The motive for the attack is currently unknown, though territorial disputes and hunger are the leading theories,” reported USA Today, adding, “The drone team is considering ways to prevent future attacks, such as using designs that would make eagles less likely to mistake EGLE drones for seagulls.”
In a tweet, Michigan State Representative Beau M. LaFave said this about the “Eagle vs EGLE combat”: Michigan Eagle takes on EGLE (Department of Environment Great Lakes and Energy) and wins. Bird can be heard singing “I fought the law, and I won”
One major positive from this incident, noted USA Today, is that it highlights a “thriving eagle population. A 2019 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey showed 849 active nesting sites in Michigan, up from a low point of 76 nesting sites in the 1970s.”
Another takeaway is that the Bald Eagle may be able to serve as a natural counter-drone defense system. Perhaps DARPA, DOD and DHS are already secretly working on this.
By • The Federalist
President Donald announced another historic peace deal for the Middle East on Friday between Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain.
A joint statement released by the United States, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and the State of Israel announced the “establishment of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain.”
The agreement also specifies that “peaceful worshippers of all faiths” will be allowed to visit mosques and holy sites in Israel.
In the statement, King of Bahrain Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed their intent to “achieve a just, comprehensive, and enduring resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and praised Trump for “his dedication to peace in the region, his focus on shared challenges, and the pragmatic and unique approach he has taken to bringing their nations together.”
President Trump tweeted his support of the deal, calling it “another HISTORIC breakthrough” with “our two GREAT friends.”
The peace deal is the second of its kind involving Israel in the last month in a broader effort by the Trump administration to facilitate “stability, security, and prosperity” in the Middle East. A similar deal was struck between the United Arab Emirates and Israel in early August, making it the first “Gulf Arab country to open relations with the Jewish nation.”
In the Israel and UAE peace deal statement, the White House signaled the United States will be helping Israel continue to facilitate peace in the region with their largely Islamic neighbors.
“As a result of this diplomatic breakthrough and at the request of President Trump with the support of the United Arab Emirates, Israel will suspend declaring sovereignty over areas outlined in the President’s Vision for Peace and focus its efforts now on expanding ties with other countries in the Arab and Muslim world.”
Because of his efforts in facilitating peace in the Middle East, President Trump received two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.
White House Innovations Director Jared Kushner praised Trump for assisting in two previously “unthinkable” deals for the Middle East. He said the deal met much “optimism” on his most recent trip overseas.
“This makes America safer, allows us to bring our troops home, and allows us to work on bringing prosperity to American communities,” Kushner said.
According to the joint statement, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani will sign the official “Declaration of Peace” on Sept. 15 at the White House.
By • Newsmax
The Pentagon is wisely examining future risks of missile attack and making plans to prevent them. These plans will take at least 10 years to develop — maybe even longer, as everything often does not go as planned. In the meantime, we have our current generation Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) protecting America. While waiting for the next generation missile defense to be developed, we must keep our current generation defenses up-to-date and fully capable.
This is where there is troubling news. To afford the next generation system, the Pentagon is planning to use the funding for updates and improvements to our current GMD system to pay for the development of a future system — effectively limiting our defenses and placing America a greater risk over the next 10 years.
Our enemies are pursuing more capable missiles — greater range, greater speed, greater maneuverability to avoid interception, the ability to deploy better decoys and the ability to jam defensive technologies to effectively blind them. So it is very risky to forgo improvements to our current defenses while we work on a future system that won’t be ready for at least 10 years!
I wholeheartedly endorse the need to develop a next generation missile defense system. But the idea of leaving us exposed to a devastating missile attack in just a few short years and then leaving us even more exposed for the balance of the next decade is completely insane. The Pentagon is effectively saying that it will trust in the goodwill of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and in the kindness of the Communist Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping — who actively hid the truth from the rest of the world and lied about COVID, making the pandemic more deadly and the economic impact devastating. Imagine the insanity of trusting in the goodwill of the Iranian Mullahs? Even Russia, while no longer our chief geopolitical rival, still poses a significant risk.
We must always outpace the evolving threats. Thomas Jefferson wisely warned Americans that the price of liberty is “eternal vigilance.” And George Washington counseled that “to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” These words should ring loudly in our ears. To fail to be vigilant on something as important as nuclear missile attack is worse than stupid, it is suicidal!
Our layered missile defense includes elements that protect our troops around the globe wherever they may be, and the vast American homeland. GMD defends America’s vast homeland. Patriot, Aegis and THAAD are designed to protect American warfighters, bases and ships from missile attack. Their coverage zone is far too small to effectively protect the vast US homeland.
For example, Aegis as impressive as it is, defends an area that is 14 times smaller than GMD, based on material recently presented by VADM Jon Hill, Director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. And THAAD’s area defended is less than half that of Aegis and neither gives a second shot intercept opportunity.
To defend the vast American homeland, we have GMD. And that is the system the Pentagon wants to significantly upgrade in about 10 years. Eventually, the plan is for GMD to employ the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI). But neglecting our current GMD system — killing off all upgrades, zeroing out all improvements, and refusing to increase the number of interceptors we have available will only benefit our enemies and place Americans at risk until the day the new system is available — at least 10 years from now.
Without the ability to test the system and keep our defenses sharp, we would simply be hoping for good results. Hope isn’t a serious strategy when it comes to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
To be blunt, leaving the current system without incremental upgrades for the next 10 years while announcing a major system upgrade that will hopefully be ready in 10 years, sounds like an invitation to attack before the new system is in place and while the current system has grown outdated and less capable. We shouldn’t be sending that sort of invitation to the world’s dictators.
The President and many in Congress on both sides of the aisle want to upgrade our current defenses and also develop the needed next generation defense. Americans of all political stripes should want to prevent America from suffering a devastating nuclear missile attack.
We need Congress to provide sufficient funding for missile defense so that we can keep our current defenses strong, and so that we can develop even better future defenses to meet the growing risks. To do less than this is reckless and courting disaster. And those who are willing to recklessly court disaster should never again be trusted to serve the American people.
Could it signal a new era in the Middle East?
By • DrLarryOnline.com
President Trump last Thursday announced the first Middle Eastern treaty in 26 years between Israel and an Arab country. Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries. The heart of the agreement is the UAE recognition of Israeli sovereignty in exchange for Israel’s postponing its intention to annex the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The treaty is being hailed as a major step toward peace in the Middle East.
Most of us do not know enough about the situation to understand the importance of this step. So, let’s take a quick look.
From President Trump’s first trip abroad which was to Saudi Arabia in 2017 and ever since, one of his first priorities in foreign policy has been to promote peace in the Middle East, which has cost the United States so much blood and treasure in the past several years. The underlying motivation for USA involvement since the 1920’s has been protection of America’s oil supply, the greatest source of which has been the Middle East, specifically (since the fall of Iran in 1978) Saudi Arabia.
One of the greatest imperatives, therefore, has been to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Luckily, the development of new technology for the venerable practice of fracking has made that goal achievable, and the encouragement of the new Administration has assisted the industry to realize America’s independence from importing foreign oil – a major milestone in Middle Eastern policy.
The full effect of this abundance, however, has been delayed by the lack of available refinery capacity, due to very onerous restrictions imposed by previous Congresses aimed at protecting the environment. Nevertheless, the USA now occupies a much stronger position than previously in its Middle Eastern negotiations.
The other major factor in Middle Eastern policy since 1948 has been the US relationship with Israel, particularly, the hostility with which Israel has been viewed by its Arab neighbors. Egypt, the largest Arab neighbor of Israel, made peace with Israel in 1978. That treaty was brokered by President Jimmy Carter after President Richard Nixon saved the Israelis from defeat in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. However, there have been few additional breakthroughs since then as the Palestinians grew more and more influential after being adopted by Iran.
This treaty has followed a succession of moves by the Trump Administration over the past three years, after President Obama had alienated the Sunni Muslim neighbors of Israel by his extraordinary treatment of Iran, the leader now of the Shia Muslim countries in the age old feud between the two branches of Islam. The open enmity of the Iranian leadership toward all the allies of the United States, especially against its Sunni neighbors, has been growing as Iran has committed more and more resources to its terrorist activities. Understandably, the Obama pact has therefore become ever more odious to our Sunni allies. So, in order to show them good faith, Trump repudiated that agreement (which was never ratified by the US Senate).
Next, he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, implementing a promise made by several of his predecessors but never executed. He then formed the Sunni-Israeli Coalition which unofficially coordinates the anti-Iran activities of its members – Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman. The establishment of this group is an astonishing development, given the fierce anti-Israeli posture of Arabs in the past. It also engages the leader of the Sunni opposition, Saudi Arabia, with Israel in a way which was inconceivable only a few years ago.
Now comes the treaty with the UAE. Because of its strategic position at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the beginning of the Gulf of Oman as well as its vast oil reserves, the UAE is very influential as a trend-setter among the Sunni countries. It also has a very vulnerable coastline across the narrowest stretch of Persian Gulf water between its shores and coast of Iran.
Another consideration can be imputed to the government in that its economy – and its citizens – tend to be aggressive, prosperous and progressive. The increased familiarity with Israel is bound to be reflected in an increased exposure to the United States which bodes well for one of the historically most active trading centers in the Gulf, if not in the entire Arab world. This aspect of the new treaty is highlighted by the invitation to the principals to come to the White House for the official signing of the treaty in the next three weeks.
In summary, this treaty joins similar treaties between Israel and two other Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan (1984), and is a significant step towards the President’s goal of creating a more peaceful Middle East, where the USA’s interests can be trade and commerce instead of war and violence. However, this development and the trend of the Sunni nations to band together with the United States does have a military implication.
For one thing, it puts Iraq, a traditional enemy of Iran, but one where Iranian influence has been rapidly increasing, right in the crosshairs of the territorial distance between Iran’s eastern border with Iran, and its western border with Saudi Arabia. In spite of all the sacrifices Americans made to win freedom for the Iraqi people, the ascendency of Iran’s influence there makes its future posture toward the USA highly problematical.
Be that as it may, UAE’s joining the American side of this rivalry must be comforting to them. And this, of course, is due to the Trump revival of America’s military capabilities. Seeking protection from a country which could not defeat a ragtag force of Afghan rebels in 19 years would not be attractive without it. Only a double-edged initiative of diplomacy and might will win new friends.
Finally, there is China. The UAE is one of China’s major suppliers of energy. Accordingly, China has been taking a notable interest in the UAE — and all of the Gulf states. It is not beyond imagination that China has had its eye on major influence, if not control, of the Persian Gulf, with its friend Iran on one bank and the UAE on the other. China’s avowed goal of world domination would be well served if their permission, if not assistance, would be required for commerce to continue in the world’s most active energy industry depots. In that particular race, the treaty means America 1, China 0.
Well done, Mr. President, and congratulations also to your young phenomenon, Jared Kushner (who represented the President on these negotiations).
By • Real Clear Politics
Between June 24 and July 22, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General William Barr, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a series of speeches on the China challenge. In mid-July — after the national security adviser’s and FBI director’s speeches but before the attorney general’s and secretary of state’s speeches — the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights released a draft report.
The report examines the implications of the American Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the place of human rights in American foreign policy. Focusing on principles rather than concrete policy controversies, the report provoked considerably more partisan rancor than the series of speeches by high-ranking administration officials about the need for the nation to address the Communist Party of China’s resolute efforts to marshal its dictatorial powers to undercut American interests and transform world order.
Perhaps the relatively restrained reception of the four speeches is a good sign: It may suggest an emerging national consensus about the urgency of the China challenge. Yet awareness of a daunting problem does not guarantee the capacity to deal with it effectively. The controversy over the commission’s report — indeed, the indignation and scorn directed by many politicians, pundits, professors, and NGOs at the very idea of allocating taxpayer dollars to regrounding U.S. diplomacy in America’s founding principles and constitutional responsibilities — reflects the nation’s disunity, a disunity that thwarts the planning and implementation of foreign policy.
Understanding the nation’s founding principles along with its governing structures and its international obligations is crucial to developing a prudent appreciation of the nation’s vital interests and the practicable means for achieving them. In a time of severe political polarization, moreover, such understanding can contribute to the reinvigoration of the social cohesion and political consensus, the civic concord, on which developing and executing a demanding foreign policy has always depended.
The administration’s recent series of speeches about China stresses the connection between governing ideas and foreign policy, for China as well as for the United States.
In his June 24 speech at the Arizona Commerce Authority in Phoenix, O’Brien ascribed “the greatest failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s” — the failure “to understand the nature of the Chinese Communist Party” — to the refusal to “pay heed to the CCP’s ideology.” The CCP’s ruthless indoctrination of its own people and promulgation of deceitful propaganda abroad, along with its purchasing and stealing of personal data about Americans and hundreds of millions around the world, flows from communist convictions: “Under communism, individuals are merely a means to be used toward the achievement of the ends of the collective nation state,” said O’Brien. “Thus, individuals can be easily sacrificed for the nation state’s goals.” In contrast, the United States, “will stay true to our principles — especially freedom of speech — which stand in stark contrast to the Marxist-Leninist ideology embraced by the CCP… and above all, continue to proclaim that all women and men are entitled by right of God to liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In his July 7 remarks at the Hudson Institute in Washington, Wray focused on the threat posed by China’s counterintelligence operations and economic espionage. American citizens, according to Wray, “are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.” By means of a “whole-of-state effort,” China uses technology to steal personal and corporate data “to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary.” Because communism erases the distinction between government and party, public and private, and civilian and military, the CCP can concentrate prodigious resources to exploit U.S. freedom and openness to erode American competitiveness and prosperity. The United States, maintained Wray, must redouble its commitment to enforcing criminal laws and upholding international norms: “The FBI and our partners throughout the U.S. government will hold China accountable and protect our nation’s innovation, ideas, and way of life — with the help and vigilance of the American people.”
In his July 17 speech in Michigan at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, Barr summarized the predatory commercial practices by which China has cornered markets, induced economic dependence, and transformed the international order to advance its hegemonic interests. In particular, Barr emphasized that Beijing has impelled American enterprises to toe China’s party line. Hollywood alters the content of its films to avoid offending the CCP. Apple removed a news app from the phones it sells in China because of CCP displeasure over the app’s coverage of the Hong Kong democracy protests. Under pressure from Chinese influence campaigns threatening the loss of access to China’s enormous markets, American business leaders of all sorts “put a ‘friendly face’ on pro-regime policies.” And American higher education and research institutions face, and in many cases have succumbed to, China’s determined efforts “to infiltrate, censor, or co-opt.” To counter the China challenge, Barr calls on corporate and academic leaders to appreciate “that what allowed them to succeed in the first place was the American free enterprise system, the rule of law, and the security afforded by America’s economic, technological, and military strength.”
In his July 22 capstone speech at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, Pompeo distilled the China challenge: “China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else.” Stressing that America’s quarrel is with the Chinese Communist Party, which governs dictatorially, and not with the Chinese people, whose human rights the CCP systematically violates, Pompeo maintained that the United States must change China’s behavior. To do so the U.S. must fully understand Chinese communism, which drives the regime’s quest for global hegemony. To be sure, “the only way to truly change communist China is to act not on the basis of what Chinese leaders say, but how they behave.” But how Beijing behaves becomes intelligible in light of what the CCP says at party gatherings and in official documents about the imperatives for totalitarian rule at home and the establishment beyond China’s borders of a worldwide tributary system with Beijing at the center. Because of China’s hegemonic ambition, formidable economic power, and unremitting military buildup, Pompeo asserted, “securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time, and America is perfectly positioned to lead it because our founding principles give us that opportunity.”
But will we seize that opportunity? Can an angry and divided nation draw on its founding principles and constitutional traditions, as the secretary of state asked the Commission on Unalienable Rights to do? Can citizens across the political spectrum take pride in, preserve, and carry forward America’s great achievements in respecting the nation’s founding principles while learning from the country’s flagrant deviations from them? Can people throughout the nation recover the conviction that the practice of American constitutional government and the belief that inspires it — that all are by nature free and equal — provide the common ground on which citizens of diverse persuasions can air their differences, accommodate competing perspectives, make their cases, and instruct and be instructed, and so rededicate themselves to the shared enterprise of self-government?
To rise to the China challenge, we must.
Generally, when we think of multibillion-dollar military contracts, we think of advanced weapon systems or other cutting-edge technologies. However, a recent Pentagon contract that is intended to overhaul how the military moves service members’ household belongings has hit the news. In an attempt to both save taxpayer money and provide a streamlined, more reliable, and higher quality moving experience for military families, the Pentagon recently requested proposals to revamp and privatize these moving services for America’s military families. The initial contract is valued at more than $7 billion, and with future options and extensions, could exceed $20 billion.
The contract process has been marred with serious misfires. The problem is that the Pentagon originally awarded the Global Household Goods Contract to American Roll-On Roll-Off Carrier Group (ARC) under questionable circumstances. ARC’s capacity to actually perform the contract is doubtful. ARC’s bid was more than $2 billion higher than competitors who actually have experience and a real track record.
Another problem was that ARC’s proposal incorrectly listed Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics AS as its parent company. The listed parent company pleaded guilty to bid-rigging and price-fixing only four years ago and faced a fine of $100 million. On top of that, the Department of Justice indicted three former and current executives in the matter.
It turns out that ARC’s parent company is actually Wallenius Wilhelmsen ASA which didn’t plead guilty to bid-rigging or price-fixing. However, Wallenius Wilhelmsen ASA is the parent company of both ARC and the convicted company, Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics AS, so there is a real and formal corporate genealogical relationship between the ARC and the bid-rigging and price-fixing company.
The contract award was challenged or protested on these and other grounds (a total of nine specific grounds). Normally, protests take up to four months to review, but the Pentagon’s TRANSCOM took only two weeks to review its original decision before reinstating it. TRANSCOM only looked at the bid-rigging and price-fixing conviction issue and ignored all the other issues. TRANSCOM’s review was focused more on technicalities than real-life concerns.
Bid-rigging and price-fixing issue aside, the formal protests of the contract award to ARC included eight other grounds any one of which would be sufficient to overturn the contract award. As previously mentioned, ARC’s bid was more than $2 billion higher than other bids, which were found to be both responsive and technically solid. Why would the Pentagon be willing to pay an extra $2 billion for nothing?
It gets worse. Not only is ARC’s bid $2 billion higher than its competitors, but ARC doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the massive number of moves that will happen in 2021 due to the 2020 military moves that were postponed and disrupted by COVID-19. ARC has less than 100 employees to oversee all military moves and related subcontractors. Moreover, ARC does not have any experience in military moves, so ARC can’t seriously argue that they have state of the art experience that will allow them to get the job done with so few people.
This contract is a once in a generation chance to reorganize the military’s moving system to create better accountability and in the end better results for America’s military families, all while saving money. However, it seems unlikely to turn out well if the new moving contract is to be administered by a company with a corporate genealogy that includes bid-rigging and price-fixing. Moreover, ARC’s large team of subcontractors includes a large number with a questionable performance history. If the goal is to reduce costs and improve moving experiences, this seems a poor way to accomplish the stated goals.
The Pentagon has made a big mistake in awarding this contract to ARC. If the goal is to improve quality, streamline processes, and reduce costs, you don’t select a company with zero experience that lacks the capacity to deal with the significant number of military moves that occur every year, and that has bid-rigging and price-fixing convictions with $100 million fines in its corporate family tree. On top of all of that, you don’t overpay by $2 billion.
It is time for the Pentagon to get this right and not dig in its institutional heels in defense of its original misjudgment.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
Dear Fellow Americans,
Please allow me, a naturalized American, to share with you my deep concerns about the current state of affairs in the country in which I am humbled to be a citizen.
Today, a small minority has embarked upon an irresponsible adventure to terrorize the overwhelming majority of Americans. This small minority mostly consists of a heap of confused and insufficiently educated youth, who have been force-fed by their ideologically biased teachers, from kindergarten to graduate school, a visceral hatred for America as well as a discombobulated version of Marxism. Combined with a peculiar kind of sub-mediocrity, self-aggrandizing vanity, and outright disdain, they convinced themselves that they have nothing more to learn, and that they are the utopian perfection itself.
None of these pseudo-political, quasi-philosophical, or deceptively ascetic groups are neither intelligent nor earnest. Hastily conceived of by individuals who have had a great deal of ambition but very little of real life experience, their overwhelming passion has been to acquire wealth by taking it away from people who legitimately earned it. Equipped with the slogans of white supremacy, racism, political correctness, and the myth in victimhood, this small minority wants to set the nation ablazed by fabricating a homicidal revolution. During the present misery of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a precipitous rush. Every protester or rioter has opinions that are rather fickle, impulsive, superficial, and arrogant to the point of absolute hatred toward the United States of America, its constitution, its institutions, its elected officials, its morality, and its traditions. To add insult to injury, none of these great dividers has any genuine empathy for the poor and the weak, or a real understanding for the greatness and the future of this beautiful country.
Now, the majority is gripped by momentary cluelessness mixed with irrational fear. Cowed by sheer intimidation and burgeoning violence, this majority has failed to realize the gigantic hoax inherent in the minority’s fraudulent revolution. Those of the Democrat Party and a visible number of its office holders assist the minority to weaken and destroy the constitutional order of the Republic. Even some Republican elected officials have joined those who short-sightedly kowtow to a mob-like small minority. This heterogeneous minority thus far have failed to comprehend that as soon as the political and legal systems of a nation are destroyed, even if such destruction may be reasonably justified by past vices and misguided actions, chaos and anarchy would take over and reign, unchecked.
The United States of America has risen to become the greatest nation on earth because for 240 some years it has been able to unite all the living and also the dead. Humiliating the dead by murdering the past would only lead to irreparable divisions and surely not a more perfect union. Destroying monuments and denigrating the notable ancestors would merely result in self-debasement of the nation. Disrespecting the flag, kneeling down to the national anthem, defacing painting, torching historic structures are gestures of humiliation and not symbols of unity.
The single true legacy that the Founding Fathers bequeathed on all the successive generations is that democracy is a system of government in which the majority elects the President and everybody who gains his or her legitimacy through properly executed elections. Shamefully, since 2016, when the Democrats lost a presidential election that they believed they should have won, the opposition have consisted of politicians who know that they are bereft of a vision that would attract the majority of the voters. Therefore, they have come to the destructive conclusion that their only chance to claim power is to overthrow the elected President and his administration by defamation of character and fake-legal manipulations. Hence, the spectacles of the “Russia Collusion” and the pointless impeachment charade.My fellow Americans! It is time to wake up and reassert the majority’s rule by restoring the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian-guided democratic character and sustainable future of the United States of America. Simultaneously, policies and ideas fundamentally hostile to the historic traditions, the rule of law and the spiritual realm of the nation must be fought decisively without undue apologies and prostrations. We, as free and proud citizens, have a responsibility to uphold and steadily improve the foundational realms of this great nation. Otherwise, a small and unelected mob would destroy our inheritance forever.
To know what the Chinese are really up to, read the futuristic novels of Liu Cixin.
By • Belfer Center
“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.
The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.
First, the history. What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.
Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.
How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?
The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.
Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.
When Middle America voted for Trump four years ago, it was partly a backlash against the asymmetric payoffs of engagement and its economic corollary, globalization. Not only had the economic benefits of Chimerica gone disproportionately to China, not only had its costs been borne disproportionately by working-class Americans, but now those same Americans saw that their elected leaders in Washington had acted as midwives at the birth of a new strategic superpower — a challenger for global predominance even more formidable, because economically stronger, than the Soviet Union.
It is not only Kissinger who recognizes that the relationship with Beijing has soured. Orville Schell, another long-time believer in engagement, recently conceded that the approach had foundered “because of the CCP’s deep ambivalence about the way engaging in a truly meaningful way might lead to demands for more reform and change and its ultimate demise.”
Conservative critics of engagement, meanwhile, are eager to dance on its grave, urging that the People’s Republic be economically “quarantined,” its role in global supply chains drastically reduced. There is a spring in the step of the more Sinophobic members of the Trump administration, notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and trade adviser Peter Navarro. For the past three and a half years they have been arguing that the single most important thing about Trump’s presidency was that he had changed the course of U.S. policy towards China, a shift from engagement to competition spelled out in the 2017 National Security Strategy. The events of 2020 would seem to have vindicated them.
The Covid-19 pandemic has done more than intensify Cold War II. It has revealed its existence to those who last year doubted it. The Chinese Communist Party caused this disaster — first by covering up how dangerous the new virus SARS-CoV-2 was, then by delaying the measures that might have prevented its worldwide spread.
Yet now China wants to claim the credit for saving the world from the crisis it caused. Liberally exporting cheap and not wholly reliable ventilators, testing kits and face masks, the Chinese government has sought to snatch victory from the jaws of a defeat it inflicted. The deputy director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s information department has gone so far as to endorse a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in the U.S. and retweet an article claiming that an American team had brought the virus with them when they participated in the World Military Games in Wuhan last October.
Just as implausible are Chinese claims that the U.S. is somehow behind the recurrent waves of pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. The current confrontation over the former British colony’s status is unambiguously Made in China. As Pompeo has said, the new National Security LawBeijing imposed on Hong Kong last Tuesday effectively “destroys” the territory’s semi-autonomy and tears up the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, which guaranteed that Hong Kong would retain its own legal system for 50 years after its handover to People’s Republic in 1997.
In this context, it is not really surprising that American public sentiment towards China has become markedly more hawkish since 2017, especially among older voters. China is one of few subjects these days about which there is a genuine bipartisan consensus. It is a sign of the times that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign clearly intends to portray their man as more hawkish on China than Trump. (Former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new memoir is grist to their mill.) On Hong Kong, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, is every bit as indignant as Pompeo.
I have argued that this new Cold War is both inevitable and desirable, not least because it has jolted the U.S. out of complacency and into an earnest effort not to be surpassed by China in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other strategically crucial technologies. Yet there remains, in academia especially, significant resistance to my viewthat we should stop worrying and learn to love Cold War II.
At a forum last week on World Order after Covid-19, organized by the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a clear majority of speakers warned of the perils of a new Cold War.
Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, argued instead for a “rivalry-partnership” model of “coop-etition,” in which the two nations would at once compete and cooperate in the way that Samsung and Apple have done for years.
Harvard’s Graham Allison, the author of the bestselling “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”, agreed, giving as another example the 11th-century “frenmity” between the Song Emperor of China and the Liao kingdom on China’s northern border. The pandemic, Allison argued, has made “incandescent the impossibility of identifying China clearly as either foe or friend. Rivalry-partnership may sound complicated, but life is complicated.”
“The establishment of a productive and predictable US/China relationship,” wrote John Lipsky, formerly of the International Monetary Fund, “is a sine qua non for strengthening the institutions of global governance.” The last Cold War had cast a “shadow of a global holocaust for decades,” observed James Steinberg, a former deputy secretary of state. “What can be done to create a context to limit the rivalry and create space for cooperation?”
Elizabeth Economy, my colleague at the Hoover Institution, had an answer: “The United States and China could … partner to address a global challenge,” namely climate change. Tom Wright of the Brookings Institution took a similar line: “Focusing only on great power competition while ignoring the need for cooperation will not actually give the United States an enduring strategic advantage over China.”
All this sounds eminently reasonable, apart from one thing. The Chinese Communist Party isn’t Samsung, much less the Liao kingdom. Rather — as was true in Cold War I, when (especially after 1968) academics tended to be doves rather than hawks — today’s proponents of “rivalry-partnership” are overlooking the possibility that the Chinese aren’t interested in being frenemies. They know full well this is a Cold War, because they started it.
To be sure, there are also Chinese scholars who lament the passing of engagement. The economist Yu Yongding recently joined Kevin Gallagher of Boston University to argue for reconciliation between Washington and Beijing. Yet that is no longer the official view in Beijing. When I first began talking publicly about Cold War II at conferences last year, I was surprised that no Chinese delegates contradicted me. In September, I asked one of them — the Chinese head of a major international institution — why that was. “Because I agree with you!” he replied with a smile.
As a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I have seen for myself the ideological turning of the tide under Xi. Academics who study taboo subjects such as the Cultural Revolution find themselves subject to investigations or worse. Those who take a more combative stance toward the West get promoted.
Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua, recently argued that Cold War II, unlike Cold War I, will be a purely technological competition, without proxy wars and nuclear brinkmanship. Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, was equally candid in an interview with the Beijing Cultural Review, published on April 28.
“To a certain degree we already find ourselves in the situation of a New Cold War,” he said. “There are two basic reasons for this. The first is the need for Western politicians to play the blame game” about the origins of the pandemic. “The next thing,” he added, “is that now Westerners want to make this into a ‘systems’ question, saying that the reason that China could carry out such drastic control measures [in Hubei province] is because China is not a democratic society, and this is where the power and capacity to do this came from.”
This, however, is weak beer compared with the hard stuff regularly served up on Twitter by the pack leader of the “wolf warrior” diplomats, Zhao Lijian. “The Hong Kong Autonomy Act passed by the US Senate is nothing but a piece of scrap paper,” he tweeted on Monday, in response to the congressional retaliation against China’s new Hong Kong security law. By his standards, this was understatement.
The tone of the official Chinese communiqué released after Pompeo’s June 17 meeting in Hawaii with Yang Jiechi, the director of the Communist Party’s Office of Foreign Affairs, was vintage Cold War. On the persecution of the Uighurs, for example, it called on “the US side to respect China’s counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts, stop applying double standards on counter-terrorism issues, and stop using Xinjiang-related issues as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
And this old shrillness, so reminiscent of the Mao Zedong era, is not reserved for the U.S. alone. The Chinese government lashes out at any country that has the temerity to criticize it, from Australia — “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe” according to the editor of the Party-controlled Global Times — to India to the U.K.
Those who hope to revive engagement, or at least establish frenmity with Beijing, underestimate the influence of Wang Huning, a member since 2017 of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the most powerful body in China, and Xi’s most influential adviser. Back in August 1988, Wang spent six months in the U.S. as a visiting scholar, traveling to more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities. His account of that trip, “America against America,” (published in 1991) is a critique — in places scathing — of American democracy, capitalism and culture (racial division features prominently in the third chapter).
Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. “The Dark Forest” was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful “Three-Body Problem.” It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.
“The Dark Forest,” which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”
First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound … The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.
Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism.
Of course, you may say, it’s just sci-fi. Yes, but “The Dark Forest” gives us an insight into something we think too little about: how Xi’s China thinks. It’s not up to us whether or not we have a Cold War with China, if China has already declared Cold War on us.
Not only are we already in the foothills of that new Cold War; those foothills are also impenetrably covered in a dark forest of China’s devising.
