Category: international affairs

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international affairs scandal

Two Conspiracies Unearthed

night, mystery

Two huge stories broke this week.

The first is that the “People’s Republic” of China guided American policy for decades using “old friends” who had “penetrated the highest levels of the U.S. government and financial institutions before the Trump administration.” 

Bill Gerz, writing in The Washington Times, reported that “Di Dongsheng, a professor and associate dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, also suggested in a Nov. 28 speech that China’s Communist Party helped Hunter Biden, a son of presumptive President-​elect Joseph R. Biden, obtain Chinese business deals.” 

These remarks were posted as a video on the professor’s Weibo account (think “Chinese Facebook”). Though quickly removed, copies went viral.

The second story? “Did Donald Trump Nearly Confirm Existence of Aliens? Israeli Ex-​Space Chief Makes Bizarre Claim,” by Jeffrey Martin, writing at Newsweek. “Professor Haim Eshed, who served as the head of Israel’s space program from 1981 to 2010 spoke to the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Sunday. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post published some of Eshed’s quotes in English and they contained the most incredible claims made about Trump, who has long [been] the center of conspiracy theories — some of which he has actively encouraged.”

Eshed claims that both the U.S. and Israel have had contact with extraterrestrial civilizations (a “Galactic Federation,” no less) and that President Trump was about to go full-​on Full Disclosure but — somehow — the aliens stopped him.

Quite a yarn, not unfamiliar to science fiction readers and moviegoers. But note: quite a few de-​classified Pentagon, FBI and CIA documents suggest something very much like this. And in the last few years we’ve covered the U.S. Government’s trickling admissions that the UFO phenomenon is not all fakery, but real and odd.

Both stories hail from professors with close ties to foreign governments. Both point to actual conspiracies. Both present “epistemic” problems for us: they are neither easily proved or disproved.

Both, also, are too eerily plausible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs media and media people

Maybe Next Year?

Time Magazine, Person of the Year, cat

Once again, TIME is skipping right over you and me for consideration as the magazine’s “Person of the Year for 2020.”

What am I saying, YOU were named back in 2006!

TIME’s choice can be important recognition for someone working against all odds to make a very positive difference in this world. Lech Wałęsa in 1981, for instance, and Gandhi in 1930.*

Last year’s pick of Greta Thornburg? Not. So. Much.

While presidents often get the coveted cover, President-​elect Joe Biden garnered only 3 percent of the public “advisory” vote. “Essential workers” had the most support at 35 percent. Seems too amorphous … a catalyst mostly for endless debate.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the federal government’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 36 years, was next at 31 percent of respondents. No one else had more than 5 percent.

Don’t choose Fauci, please! Despite his experience, his pandemic performance has been less than expert. Under his leadership, Americans were told for months that masks would be of no benefit, then suddenly mandated to wear them.

Last June, Sen. Rand Paul, who is a physician, tried to get Fauci to address the ample scientific data indicating it was safe to open the schools. Fauci deflected and dithered until flippantly declaring last week: “Close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say.”

That is certainly not, Fox New’s Tucker Carlson exasperatedly explained, what Fauci was “really” saying months ago.

Forget Fauci. For leading the best national response to COVID-​19, TIME should name Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-​wen 2020’s “Person of the Year.”

It would send a powerful message about leadership. And freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The magazine has also named dictators and mass murderers: Hitler served as 1938’s “Man of the Year” and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took the top spot the next year, and again in 1942; in 1979, with Americans held hostage in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini glared at us from TIME’s cover. 

Note: My biggest disappointment was in 2013, when TIME cowardly choose Pope Francis over Edward Snowden.

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international affairs national politics & policies

The Return of the Imperialists

Joe Biden, war, foreign policy

We don’t live in a Star Wars universe. Not yet. But certain themes crop up: republic gives way to empire, and elite corps of … magic fighters? … seek to run a technocratic state. 

Donald Trump was cast by Democrats as an evil emperor sort of figure, but he didn’t quite fit that script — being the only president in two decades not to engage in a regime-​change war.

So, with President-​not-​quite-​Elect Joe Biden publicly announcing his new cabinet heads, we can see the old script followed closely, with the imperial guard piling up outside the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania, panting for power.

Though there are reams of news stories about this to pore over — the picks are big news — I’ll focus on Reason’s round-​up. Of course, Biden is offering up Big Spenders (for whom deficits and debts just don’t matter*) as well as gung-​ho interventionists. Take the Secretary of State candidate, Antony Blinken, profiled by Bonnie Kristian. While the proposed Secretary pro forma admitted that America cannot “solve all the world’s problems alone,” he then suggested that “our government can solve all the world’s problems if only it partners with other governments,” Ms. Kristian relates. She notes that Blinken has supported “U.S. military action in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. 

“And though he has since regretted the Yemen call, he believes the mistake in Syria was a failure to escalate.”

President Donald John Trump has followed the bomber love of his advisors, but has never quite bought into the need to escalate every conflict. And for that audacity, the foreign policy establishment has loathed him.

When Biden does hobble into the White House, we can unfortunately expect fewer ‘failures to escalate.’

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* While Republicans do almost nothing to hold back deficit spending, and consequent debt accumulation, Democrats increasingly demonstrate a special zealotry in confessing their lack of concern.

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international affairs

Good Relations with Genocide?

Joe Biden, China, communism, human rights

“Beijing is trying to convince the incoming Biden administration that the U.S.-China relationship can be smooth and positive,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “but only if Washington dumps the Trump administration’s policies, ignores China’s worst behaviors and pretends everything is fine.”

It is more than a little scary because “pretending” is one of the political establishment’s greatest skill-​sets. Plus, the columnist reminds that “calls for the Biden administration to reverse course are coming not only from China but also from … former secretary of state Henry Kissinger” and a “range of interest groups.” 

But “yielding to China’s demands,” Rogin warns President-​Elect Biden, “would be going against a majority of Americans in both parties and breaking Biden’s campaign promises to stand up to [Chinese leader] Xi.”

Consider “Beijing’s naked economic extortion of Australia,” argues Rogin. “If Biden intends to repair alliances, he should realize that allies like Australia want support for resistance to China’s bullying.”

So, what does China want?

“A Chinese official gave the Sydney Morning Herald a list of the conditions it expects in return for lifting harsh sanctions on Australia’s agricultural and mineral export industries,” Rogin explains. “… Australia must stop exposing Chinese Communist Party influence efforts on its soil; shut up about Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Uighurs; open its doors to Chinese tech companies; and quit calling for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.”

Rogin notes “concern in Asia” about whether Mr. Biden will return to the Obama Administration’s weak stance on China, which “would allow serious problems to fester, raising the long-​term risk of just the kind of serious conflict both countries would like to avoid.”

How “good” should our relations be with nations engaged in genocide, such as China?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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In Deep with Biden

Joe Biden, war, deep state

On Election Day, “the Empire hopes to strike back,” writes Daniel McCarthy for The Spectator. “Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

McCarthy argues that “Biden’s overall record is one of foreign policy interventionism,” but Biden’s Senate voting record is iffy-​fifty: Biden “voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge.” He voted for the 1999 Serbian war, which destabilized relations with Russia, allowing the rise of Putin. But Biden voted against 1991’s Persian Gulf adventure which set the stage for post-​Cold War American megalomania.

Nevertheless, McCarthy argues that “Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-​Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.”

Such a plausible case. War is certainly government “activism.”

McCarthy has spotted a real problem in “progressive liberalism,” and understands the “peer pressure” that so oppressively rules in the corridors of power. But he misses — perhaps merely for reasons of space — the sheer institutional power of the Deep State. It holds the secrets, it controls vast amounts of money, its immensity overpowers rational thought.

It is the government we cannot get to; it is the government that tried to “get” Trump.

Perhaps our “right to petition the government” can skip Congress and go right to the source, the Deep State.

Which really wants Biden to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs

The Culture of Genocide

Stapleton Roy, former U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong,

“Let’s be careful with our language,” advises Stapleton Roy, former U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. 

Very careful. Totally careful. Totalitarian-​ly careful.

Speaking to students earlier this month in a Zoom meeting as part of Pomona University’s Model United Nations, Roy took issue with Hong Kong students and protesters for “provoking mainland intervention,” arguing the millions who marched for basic democracy “went too far” and should have used more “self-​restraint.”

The U.S. foreign affairs veteran even decries the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which he also concludes “set back the cause of reform in China for decades.”

And here I was thinking that the massacre of an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 unarmed Chinese civilians by the People’s Liberation Army is what detoured that noble cause.

“China has come under criticism from U.S. officials following revelations of mass forced sterilization of Uyghur women, as well as the internment of over one million Uyghurs in camps where detainees are forced to learn Communist Party ideology. Reports of torture, rape, and other abuses have emerged from these camps,” writes National Review’s Zachary Evans.

“Genocide is generally used to refer to the extermination of a people or nation,” Ambassador Roy explains. “Genocide is not taking place in Xinjiang.” 

Yet according to the United Nations, the Chinese Communist Party’s manner of oppression does constitute “genocide.” 

“More accurately,” even Roy acknowledges, “there is what can be called ‘cultural genocide.’”*

That is merely the extermination of a people’s customs, religion, ethnicity and, imperatively, their freedom … but kindheartedly not murdering all of them. 

Okay, Mr. Ambassador, let’s choose our terms precisely. Protesters in Hong Kong have a word for the Beijing government: “ChiNazis.” 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* What a coincidence! “China seized control over Tibet in 1950 in what it describes as a ‘peaceful liberation’ that helped the remote Himalayan region throw off its ‘feudalist’ past,” notes a recent Al Jazeera report. “But critics, led by exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, say Beijing’s rule amounts to ‘cultural genocide.’”

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