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Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

A week from now, the 29 member states of “the most successful alliance in history” will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO.

Instead of a “summit,” the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda?

Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget.

French President Emanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered “brain death.” Macron now openly questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe and is talking about a “true European Army” with France’s nuclear deterrent able to “defend Europe alone.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation spends 1.4% of GDP on defense and has relied on the U.S. and NATO to keep Russia at bay since the Cold War began, is said to be enraged at the “disruptive politics” of the French president.
Also, early in December, Britain holds national elections. While the Labour Party remains committed to NATO, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is no Clement Attlee, who took Britain into NATO at its birth in 1949.

Corbyn has questioned NATO’s continued relevance in the post-Cold War era. A potential backer of a new Labour government, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, is demanding the closing of Britain’s Trident submarine base in Scotland as a precondition of her party’s support for Labour in Parliament.

Also present in London will be NATO ally Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan.

Following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has purged scores of thousands from his army and regime, jailed more journalists than any other authoritarian, purchased Vladimir Putin’s S-400 missile system as Turkey’s air defense, and ordered the U.S. forces out of his way as he invaded northern Syria, killing Kurdish fighters who did the bleeding and dying in the U.S.-led campaign to crush the ISIS caliphate.

During the Cold War, NATO enjoyed the widespread support of Americans and Europeans, and understandably so. The USSR had 20 divisions in Germany, surrounded West Berlin, and occupied the east bank of the Elbe, within striking distance of the Rhine.

But that Cold War is long over. Berlin is the united free capital of Germany. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved. Its member states have all joined NATO. The Soviet Union split apart into 15 nations. Communist Yugoslavia splintered into seven nations.

As a fighting faith, communism is dead in Europe. Why then are we Americans still over there?

Since the Cold War, we have doubled the size of NATO. We have brought in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but not Finland or Sweden. We have committed ourselves to fight for Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro but not Serbia, Bosnia or North Macedonia.

Romania and Bulgaria are NATO allies but not Moldova or Belarus.

George W. Bush kept us out of the 2008 Russia-Georgia clash over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And Barack Obama refused to send lethal aid to help Ukraine retrieve Crimea, Luhansk or Donetsk, though Sen. John McCain wanted the United States to jump into both fights.

In the House Intel Committee’s impeachment hearings, foreign service officers spoke of “Russian aggression” against our Ukrainian “ally” and our “national security” being in peril in this fight.

But when did Ukraine become an ally of the United States whose territorial wars we must sustain with military aid if not military intervention?

When did Kyiv’s control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?

Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.

And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.

Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons?

Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?

In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on Germany. Would Justin Trudeau’s Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin’s Russia — for Estonia or Latvia?

Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations even closer to Russia.

One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.

Audi has made arrangements to slash 9,500 of its 61,000 workers in Germany over the next five years to streamline its business ahead of a period where the global economy is expected to grow below trend, Automotive New reported. 

Though Audi’s investor relations has spun the massive job cuts as a way to transition the company into a sustainable path of investing in the future of electric cars, the actual reason for the cuts is because the global automobile industry is collapsing.

The epicenter of the automobile downturn is in China, India, Germany, and Japan. Some industry hubs in the US have already been affected.

Audi sales have plunged, and revenues and operating profits are down in the first nine months of 2019. The upcoming restructuring is in preparation for the company to weather the economic storm.

Audi will save at least $6.6 billion from the cuts, which will allow it to channel money into building out its electric car segment and create several thousand green jobs.

Audi said in a statement on Tuesday that the cuts would “take place along the demographic curve – in particular through employee turnover and a new, attractive early retirement program.”

“The company must become lean and fit for the future, which means that some job profiles will no longer be needed and new ones will be created.”

Audi employs 90,000 people around the world, 60,000 of those are in Germany.

It’s not just Audi that is experiencing a slowdown in sales. Other major German auto manufacturers are feeling the pain as the slowdown is expected to continue through 2020.

Audi survived the 2008 financial crisis by slashing its workforce well ahead of the crisis. This time isn’t different.

Audi CEO Bram Schot said, “In times of upheaval, we are making Audi more agile and more efficient. This will increase productivity and sustainably strengthen the competitiveness of our German plants.”

World stocks at the moment are ignoring the implosion of the global automobile industry…

Authored by Bruce Bawer via The Gatestone Institute,

When I moved to Norway twenty years ago, a term I encountered often was “American conditions” (amerikanske tilstander). It was always used disparagingly. It referred to such things as urban sprawl, strip malls, inner-city gangs, school shootings and private health care. After Barack Obama became president, I heard the term far less frequently — in Norway, after all, you cannot get too rough on a country with a black president, especially a president to whom you have given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, even though Trump-bashing — in Norway as in the U.S. — is the media’s favorite sport, the term does not seem to have come back into widespread use, which perhaps has something to do with the fact that the U.S., among other things, now has the world’s strongest economy and staggeringly enviable employment figures. Meanwhile, there is another term that has become increasingly common in Norway: “Swedish conditions” (svenske tilstander). It really took off about two years ago, when Sylvi Listhaug, Norway’s then Minister of Immigration and Integration, used it after visiting some of Sweden’s worst Muslim enclaves — a reaction that outraged politicians and journalists on both sides of the border.

Although recently there has been good news from Sweden — which I will get to shortly — let it be said, at the outset, that the term “Swedish conditions,” when used in Norway, has exclusively negative connotations. While “American conditions” covers a wide range of purported sins, however, “Swedish conditions” means basically one thing, or rather one set of intimately related things: admitting masses of unvetted immigrants from a very different culture into your country, encouraging them to settle in monocultural, autocratic enclaves that become no-go zones, allowing them to sit home collecting generous welfare benefits instead of learning the local language and finding jobs, and punishing even their most brutal crimes with a slap on the wrist — all the while continuing to repeat the mantra that their culture has enriched Sweden and to ignore the glaring reality that Sweden is undergoing a long-term conquest as well as what one Norwegian observer has called “an inferno of violence.”

Norway is burdened by these problems, too, but not to the extent that Sweden is. After all, Sweden has the second-highest proportion of Muslims in Europe — an estimated 8.1% to France’s estimated 8.8% — and has the continent’s highest rate of population growth through immigration. Since the 1970s, when it was the fourth-richest country in the world per capita and when virtually all of its inhabitants still saw Sweden as folkhemmet, or “the people’s home,” where everyone would take care of everyone else, conditions in Sweden have deteriorated drastically. Everything from child care to elder care is being deprived of funds that are instead being used to feed, clothe and house refugees, faux refugees, and other foreign freeloaders. Many Norwegians worry, with good reason, about a massive spillover of social chaos, poverty and crime from a country with which it shares a thousand-mile-long border. “Sweden,” read a recent headline at the website of Oslo-based Human Rights Service, “is a threat to Norway.”

Nor is it just Norwegians who are concerned: Denmark does not share a land border with Sweden, but is connected to it by the Øresund Bridge between Copenhagen and the notoriously immigrant-heavy, crime-ridden Swedish city of Malmö. Both Denmark and Sweden are EU members, which generally has meant no border checks, but as of November 12, Denmark — which has tried to be at least somewhat more cautious in its approach to immigration and integration than its Scandinavian neighbors — has instituted border controls on the Øresund Bridge and on ferries arriving from Sweden.

To be sure, the cultural, political, academic, and media bigwigs in both Norway and Denmark tend, even now, to express admiration for Sweden’s immigration and integration policies, which they profess to regard as models of multiculturalism at its noblest. Audun Lysbakken, the head of Norway’s Socialist Left Party, has praised Sweden as “a light in Europe” for pursuing its frankly suicidal immigration policies.

Sweden’s own elites talk about their country in similarly glowing terms. In January of this year, a writer for the Swedish daily Aftonbladet mocked Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg for suggesting in her traditional New Year’s speech that Norwegians should have more children — a sensible proposal in a country, and continent, where the natives reproduce at a level considerably below the replacement rate.

In response, Kjetil Rolness, one of the few major authors in Norway to challenge the politically correct consensus, pointed out that, of course, native-born Swedes, who have an average of 1.67 children per household (and the figure is surely far lower among ethnic Swedes), prefer foreign refugees to Swedish babies. The Aftonbladet commentary, Rolness argued, provided a perfect example of the “wishful thinking,” “virtue signaling,” and “nearly pathological denial” of reality that characterizes official Swedish thinking about immigration and integration. Indeed, this year Sweden actually decided to increase the rate of immigration through so-called “family reunification.”

In her recent book Sweden’s Dark Soul: The Unraveling of a Utopia, the Swedish journalist Kajsa Norman provided a vivid portrait of Swedish elites’ chillingly out-of-touch attitudes toward the calamitous consequences of their immigration and integration policies. Writing about the refusal of police officials and mainstream journalists to deal responsibly with the mass sexual assaults by immigrant youths at a summer festival for teenagers, Norman notes that among these and other people in positions of influence, “sympathy for the refugees trumps sympathy for the girls.”

One is reminded, of course, of the indefensible way in which British authorities handled — or refused to handle — decades of child-rape cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and other cities throughout Britain. But in Sweden — whose distinctive history of ideological conformity and self-image as a “moral superpower” Norman writes about illuminatingly — the readiness to deny unpleasant realities is even more widespread and deep-seated than in the U.K. and other Western European countries. Nobody in Sweden needed to be told what to think or to do about the assaults at the youth festival: “In Sweden,” Norman observes, “everyone knows so well what the accepted position on any given issue is; what others are thinking and how they will deviate from that.”

Elsewhere in the Western world, ordinary working men and women — people whose well-being had long been ignored in the corridors of power — have in recent years made their dissatisfaction known: Brexit; Donald Trump; France’s Yellow Vests; the rise of so-called “populist” parties in Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The relative passivity of the Swedish masses, with their herd instinct and reflexive trust in authorities — was often commented upon and puzzled over, given that their nation is perhaps in more urgent and immediate trouble than any other in Europe. But no more.

Which brings us, finally, to the good news I mentioned up front. In recent years, after a prolonged period in the wilderness, during which the political and media establishment routinely talked about them as if they were just this side of Nazis, the Sweden Democrats (SD), the only party in the nation that takes a practical position on its wayward immigration and integration policies, have been steadily gaining support. They did not win any seats in the Riksdag, the national parliament, until 2010; by 2014 they had become Sweden’s third-largest party in parliament. Now, according to poll results released this month, SD is Sweden’s most popular party, dislodging the Social Democrats from a pinnacle of predominance that they have occupied without a break for a century.

If these poll numbers should translate into an equally impressive victory in the next general election, it will amount to an earthquake in Swedish politics. But meanwhile, the Scandinavian elites continue to smear the Sweden Democrats. In an editorial about the sensational rise in support for the party, Norway’s largest daily, VG, commented that while SD “describes what is wrong in [Swedish] society,” it doesn’t have a good answer to those problems; the task facing the two main establishment parties, the Social Democrats and Moderates, asserted VG‘s editors, is to “convince the voters that they have far better and more responsible solutions to Sweden’s challenges than the Sweden Democrats’ simple populism.”

Poppycock: it was the Social Democrats and Moderates that created Sweden’s current crisis and allowed it to endure and worsen and be considered beyond criticism; and if “simple populism” means, for a change, letting the people think for themselves and then actually listening to them, then by all means let there finally be a taste of real populism in the country that claims to be the people’s home. Truly drastic, though humane and sensible, action of the proper kind may well put off a total catastrophe for a few years. One fears, however, that the Swedes have waited too long to stand up for themselves and that it is — alas — already far too late to forestall Sweden’s transformation into a sharia state.

The Sweden Democrats’ triumph, then, may well be at once a genuine milestone in the advance of Swedish democracy and individualism and a mere turn in the road to ultimate cultural displacement.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

Kazakhstan’s first president has road map for 21st century: global alliance of leaders for nuclear-free world…

Photo: Asia Times

The Astana Club is one of the most crucial annual meetings in Eurasia, alongside the Boao forum in China and the Valdai discussions in Russia. China, Russia and Kazakhstan are all at the forefront of Eurasia integration. No wonder, then, that the 5th meeting of the Astana Club had to focus on Greater Eurasia – synonymous, it may be hoped, with a “new architecture of global cooperation.”

Astana Club congregates a fascinating mix of Eurasia-wide notables with Europeans and Americans. Virtually all relevant shades of the geopolitical spectrum are represented. Panels are very well structured (I moderated two of them). Discussions are frank and non-denial denials are heavily discouraged. Here is just a taste of what was discussed in Nur-Sultan, under the spectacular shallow dome designed by Norman Foster.

Great stabilizer

Vladimir Yakunin, chairman of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Moscow, bets that China is “ready to prepare Eurasia for the future” even while there’s “no hint it will be treated by the West in a positive way.” Yakunin sees the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative, as a “civilizational dialogue basis for China” even as Russia continues to assert itself again as a global power.

Wang Huiyao, from the Center for China and Globalization and a counselor of China’s State Council, sees China as “the biggest stabilizer” in international relations and trade as “the biggest mechanism for prosperity,” as demonstrated once again at the latest Shanghai Expo.

Senior Pakistani diplomat Iftekhar Chowdury, now at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, argues that the “liberal world order is not universal”; now it all comes down to “liberal capitalism against China.” Huiyao, for his part, is not fazed: he stresses that China already sees a “Eurasia 3D” as a new negotiation platform.

Huiyao points out how the “wrong methodology” is being applied as a “stabilizer of the world economy.” He emphasizes the role of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank  and especially Belt & Road as “a new impetus for developing the world in the next decades,” drawing on “Chinese culture, tradition, values” – plus a hybrid economy not only featuring state-owned enterprises. Belt & Road, he insists, is a “real international development plan.” In contrast, the great danger is “unilateralism”: “Do we have only one form of history?”

Jacob Frenkel, Chairman of JP Morgan International, clear-headed and didactic unlike many bankers, actually quotes from a Chinese proverb:

“The honey is sweet, but the bee stings.”

He emphasizes that “words matter. When you use ‘war’ in commerce, there are consequences” – especially when there are “millions of boats” navigating “the same ocean.”

Wang lends backing to Frenkel when he underlines the unintended consequences for third countries from the US-China trade war. Frenkel sees tariffs as “the wrong instruments” and stresses that businessmen “don’t believe in IMF models.” Boris Tadic, former President of Serbia, concentrates on how “arrogant big powers are ignoring smaller countries.”

The redoubtable Li Wei, President of the Development Research Center of the State Council Chair and a sterling negotiator, stresses that under serious “anti-globalist tendencies,” the need is for “new principles of coexistence.” China and the US should “stop exchanging punches; there have been 13 meetings to discuss the trade war.” What’s needed, says Li, in a new first stage of discussion, is for Xi and Trump to sign a memorandum of understanding.

Reacting to the possibility of China and the US signing protocols, Yakunin has to come back to his main point:

“The US is not willing to see China transform itself into a great power.”

Li, unfazed, has to mention that Xi Jinping actually launched Belt & Road in Kazakhstan – at the nearby Nazarbayev University, in 2013. He’s convinced that the initiative is capable of “fully answering all challenges of the present historical moment.”

From MAD to SAD

Terje Todd-Larsen, former Under Secretary General of the UN and President of the International Peace Institute, laments that with the multilateral system weakened, and no multilateral organization encompassing the Middle East and Northern Africa, there is no table capable anywhere of congregating Arabs, Iran, Israel and Turkey. The best hope lies with Kazakhstan – and there are precedents already, with Nur-Sultan hosting the Astana process for Syria.

On the nuclear weapons front, Yakunin notes how nations that subscribe to the Non Proliferation Treaty actually now expect a “formal affirmation they won’t be threatened.” He sees “lack of trust” as the greatest threat to the NPT: “The P5 members of the NPT did not live up to their promises.”

The legendary Mohamed El Baradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lays down the choice in stark terms: It’s either “maximum pressure, regime change and sanctions” or “dialogue, equity, cooperation, respect.” He stresses that “International institutions can’t deal with the world today – it’s way beyond them.” And the elephant in the room is, of course, nuclear weapons: “We seem frozen in place.”

El Baradei refutes the notion of the nuclear club as a model: “What is the logic and moral justification? This is an unsustainable regime.” On nuclear disarmament, it’s the nuclear states that have to start a new era. For the moment, what’s left is “to salvage the remains of nuclear arms control. We’ve gone from MAD to SAD – self-assured destruction.”

Back on the ground level, Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute introduces lethal autonomous weapons systems – as in robots with a very high degree of autonomy – into the conversation. Not that these entities would prevent, for instance, cyber-attacks, which “can be counter-productive and self-destructive, because there will be a counter-strike.”

Global alliance

The undisputed star of the show at the Astana Club is really Kazakh First President Nazarbayev. There’s a feeling among seasoned diplomats and analysts that when the history of Greater Eurasia is written, Nazarbayev will be on the front page. Global turmoil may not favor it too much at the moment, but as the Russians stress, the Eurasian Economic Union, for instance, is bound to survive sanctions and the trade war, and 2025 offers a tantalizing glimpse of the future via open market for gas and transportation. The EU and the EAEU have complementary economics, and Russia can play a major role.

Nazarbayev quotes from washed up theorist Francis Fukuyama to stress that “only three decades later,” his “anticipation did not come true.” He is keen to “critically reassess” the Eurasian model of security, now combining Europe and Asia, as most experts who prepared a detailed report on the Top Ten risks for Eurasia in 2020 agree.

Nazarbayev does have a road map for peace in the 21st century, via a manifesto he presented at the UN. That would be constituted as a global alliance of leaders for a nuclear-free world – complete with global summits dedicated to nuclear security. He can speak like that with the “moral right” of having closed one of the world’s major nuclear arsenals – Kazakhstan’s.

What’s key as much for Nazarbayev as for Xi and Putin is that Belt & Road, the Eurasian Economic Union, the European Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nation – all these initiatives and institutions – should be on overdrive, together, creating multiple negotiation tracks, all geared towards Greater Eurasia. And what better platform to advance it, conceptually, than the Astana Club?

Turns out that many companies who seek to embrace equality by any means could actually be doing their shareholders a disservice. But hey, we thought equality of outcome was a guaranteed fast track to utopia! What happened?

In fact, many companies experience stock price declines when women are added to the board of directors, Bloomberg points out.

An analysis of 14 years of market returns across almost 1,900 companies recently revealed that when companies appoint female directors, they experienced two years of stock declines. Companies saw their stock fall by an average of 2.3% just from adding one additional woman to their board.

Kaisa Snellman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD business school and a co-author of the study said: “Shareholders penalize these companies, despite the fact that increased gender diversity doesn’t have a material effect on a company’s return on assets. Nothing happens to the actual value of the companies. It’s just the perceptions that change.” 

The study suggests that investor biases are to blame. The study asked senior managers with MBAs to read fictional press releases announcing new board members. The statements were identical, but for the gender of the incoming director. Participants said that men were more likely to care about profits and less about social values, while women were deemed to be “softer”. 

Snellman continued:  “If anyone is biased, it is the market. Investors should consider organizations that add women and other under-represented groups to their boards because there’s a good chance that company is being undervalued.”

Despite this study’s findings, other non-academic reports over the years have suggested that diverse leadership results in corporate success. A McKinsey analysis concluded that board diversity correlates with positive financial performance and a 2019 Credit Suisse report noted a “performance premium for board diversity”. 

These findings have prompted investors like BlackRock to push for diversity on boards. Women now account for more than 25% of board members on the S&P 500 and 20% of boards globally.

“It has become kind of a myth. Add a woman on your board, and a company starts doing better,” Snellman continued.   

Results remain mixed when looking into diversity, however. An analysis from September showed share prices rose after companies showed better than average levels of gender diversity. Another study from October found that investors punished companies without female directors after California passed a law mandating that all boards in the state must have one woman by the end of this year. The researchers suspected that the market was reacting to the lack of compliance with the new rules for many companies. 

Snellman counted 140 research papers that showed no clear relationship between adding diversity and improving performance metrics. 

Snellman concluded: “Just to be very clear, I’m not saying that we should not promote female leaders into senior leader positions. But is there a business case for gender diversity on boards? If you ask an academic, the answer is no.”