President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order that just might save America’s democracy.
Ineptitude is the theme that runs throughout her diplomatic and national-security career.Joe Biden is reportedly considering Barack Obama’s former national-security adviser Susan Rice to be his running mate. National Review’s Jim Geraghty recently told us “20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Susan Rice.”
I worked with Rice during the Clinton administration and have five more things the public needs to know.
1. Rice was obsessed with U.N. peacekeeping to solve world conflicts. Rice was a key architect of a disastrous Clinton-administration policy — Presidential Decision Directive 25. PDD-25, as the document was called, sought to implement “assertive multilateralism” to address all global conflicts with U.N. peacekeepers. This concept, the brainchild of Rice’s mentor Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to the United Nations, rested on the assumption that due to the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.N. peacekeepers could be used to address global conflicts instead of U.S. troops. PDD-25 was so radical that at one point an early draft advocated giving the U.N. the ability to tax international phone calls to pay for new peacekeeping missions. Assertive multilateralism was a spectacular failure since it led to the deployment of lightly armed, often poorly disciplined U.N. peacekeepers in war zones such as Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia, and Somalia, where many were killed or taken hostage.
2. Rice disliked hearing opposing views. As part of my duties as a CIA analyst covering U.N. issues, I briefed Susan Rice on classified and unclassified information related to her job. It was clear that she was not interested in — and objected to — hearing intelligence that contradicted her personal views. She and her NSC boss Richard Clarke were determined to ram through PDD-25 and tried to silence officers from other government agencies (including myself) who expressed skepticism about deploying U.N. peacekeepers to war zones and civil wars. Rice also made clear to me that she did not want to hear about U.N. waste and corruption. During the one occasion when I tried to brief her on an incident of serious U.N. corruption, she cut me off by saying, “Do you know how much a B-1 bomber costs?” Her point was she did not care how much money the U.N. wasted because she believed the U.S. government wasted more.
On Watch: Marxism & The Current Insurrection in America |
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Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations & Research Chris Farrell joins Diana West, author of “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” to discuss the current unrest in the nation, the political ideologies of those involved, and a brief history of Marxism in America.
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Under president, Chinese intellectual property theft and security breaches aren’t tolerated
By Robert C. O’Brien, the assistant to the president on national security affairs
July 8, 2020
For decades, conventional wisdom held that it was only a matter of time before China would become more liberal, first economically and, then, politically. The more we opened our markets to China, the thinking went, the more we invested capital in China, the more we trained PRC bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, and even military officers, the more China would become like us.
Prior to Donald J. Trump taking office, it was under this premise that we welcomed China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 with vast concessions, overlooked gross human rights abuses and turned a blind eye to widespread technology theft. As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would liberalize to meet the rising aspirations of its people.
We could not have been more wrong — and this miscalculation is the greatest failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s. How did we make such a mistake? We did so by ignoring the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology. Instead of listening to their leaders and reading their key documents, we believed what we wanted to believe — that they were Communist in name only.
Let us be clear: The Chinese Communist Party is a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor. In fact, as journalist and former Australian government official John Garnaut has noted, the Chinese Communist Party is the last “ruling communist party that never split with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea.”
Under Marxist-Leninism, individuals do not have inherent value. People are merely a tool to achieve the ends of the nation state. These ideas may sound remote, but they are as fundamental to the Chinese Communist Party as the Bill of Rights is to Americans.
THE WASHINGTON TIMESUnited States must restore its independence from China
Cold War games entwine medicine, rare earth minerals and more
by Jeb Babbin Jed Babbin, a deputy undersecretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration, is the author of “In the Words of Our Enemies.” May 17, 2020
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Though no one in our government speaks in these terms, we are decades into a Second Cold War, this time with China. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is so deeply involved in our economy and brazen in its aggression that our ability to deal with the threats it poses is uncertain.
There are a dozen reasons for the U.S.-China rivalry — all of which are based on the ideological difference between America, a free nation, and Communist China, a totalitarian state. It was inevitable that, as China rose and the Soviet Union fell, the imbalance in global power would result in a second cold war between the United States and China.
The natural evolution of the new Cold War has produced an adversarial relationship from China’s pursuit of domination over U.S. allies such as Japan, its persistently aggressive cyberwar against us and its aggression in the South
In 1990, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping issued his “24-character strategy,” which centered around concepts such as “secure our positions,” “hide our capacities and bide our time” and “never claim leadership.” China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, hasn’t descended into the shrillness of Nikita Khrushchev’s “we will bury you,” but has given up the pretense of restraint in claiming China’s position as a global power.
One of the hallmarks of the first Cold War was the ideological struggle against Soviet communism. Another was the ever-present fear of nuclear war. Both of those factors are central to the new Cold War but seem to be ignored by American leaders.
Since January, U.S. scientists have been racing to develop a vaccine and treatments for the COVID-19 virus. Chinese cyber thieves have been working just as hard trying to steal every bit of information our scientists possess and every finding they make. China’s cyberattacks are reportedly also seeking to interfere in and sabotage our scientists’ work.
This is one of the best articles that Victor Davis Hanson has written and that is saying something as he is a brilliant writer and historian !!!! You’ll have to click on the link to read the article as National Review makes it too difficult to copy and paste their articles. Thanks to Martha Jenkins for sharing this exceptional article. Nancy
Finally, the Obama post presidency did not help his cause. After eight years of lecturing the nation about the proper time to profit, or identifying the point after which there was no need to make additional money, or that private businesspeople did not really build their businesses, or the need to spread the wealth around, Obama liberated from office almost immediately rushed to the life of private jets and luxury yachts.
He signed multimillion-dollar tech and media deals characterized by requiring little expertise and less work but the promiscuous use of his brand and name. The erstwhile lecturer in chief about redlining and insidious bias bought a mansion in Washington’s toniest district; and after warning about rising seas, coastal flooding, and the need to lower them, he bought a seaside estate at Martha Vineyard, for the fire sale price of just under $12 million. In other words, he knew no time to stop profiting; there was no point when he had enough money; he saw no reason to spread his wealth around; and he really did build his own empire,
The less charismatic purveyors of the Obama legacy have not done well.
Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to compile a dirty dossier on Trump and seed it in the Obama administration. She blew an election and ended up babbling and fixated permanently on her failure, before pathetically joining the “Resistance.” Joe Biden in his dotage may be spared her angst, given his own seeming inability to know exactly where he is and what he is supposed to say. Obama was supposed to have jump-started the careers of dozens of young, charismatic “diversity” imitators in the presidential arena, such as Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Deval Patrick, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Yang. All crashed and burned in the Democratic primaries, whether because they were not the Obama Adonis or because they reminded voters of his shallowness.
We were supposed to see a fundamental transformation of the country between 2009 and 2025, as the Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum finally made America right and correct. Instead, we witnessed eight years that ended in scandal whose full dimensions of criminality will take years to process.
NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
The University of Queensland is what Australians call a “sandstone university,” something like the American Ivy League in prestige. Queensland consistently appears on lists of the world’s 100 best universities and is widely seen as one of the top three in Australia.
Lately, however, its cozy relationship with China has ignited a firestorm. Questions have been asked in Australia’s Parliament, and stories in the country’s leading newspapers and on its public television network have raked administrators over the coals. A Journal news story offers an overview of the scandal.
Queensland’s purgatory began last July during a peaceful student demonstration in support of Hong Kongers protesting for democracy and in solidarity with persecuted Uighurs in Xinjiang. The demonstrators were set upon by what observers said was a well-organized group of about 300 students and nonstudents, many shouting slogans in Chinese. As some filmed the rally, counterdemonstrators snatched megaphones from the pro-Hong Kong and pro-Uighur protesters and sought to break up the rally. Punches were thrown.
Xu Jie, China’s consul general in Brisbane, commended the counter-demonstrators for their “acts of patriotism,” while blaming the pro-Hong Kong students for “igniting anger and sparking protests from Chinese students.” In a highly unusual step, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne warned all foreign diplomats in Australia to respect the rights of free speech and peaceful protest. Amid all this, the press reported that Mr. Xu had recently been appointed an adjunct professor at the university.