Tag: finance

In just a few short days, China has proved that investors who have been underestimating the geopolitical risks stemming from the simmering tensions between the US and China over the latter’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and paranoia over the fate of Taiwan – a de facto independent state that President Xi Jinping is aggressively seeking to bring under the heel of Beijing – have done so at their own peril.

Earlier this week Xi Jinping, the Chinese emperor for life president provoked an angry rebuke from Taiwan’s pro-independence president when he demanded during a landmark speech earlier this week that Taiwan submit to “reunification” with Beijing.

And as if tensions between China and the international community weren’t already high enough amid a worsening economic slowdown that’s hurting global economic growth and a tenuous trade “truce” with the US,  in another speech delivered on Friday during a meeting of top officials from China’s Central Military Commission which he leads, Xi took his belligerent rhetoric one step further by issuing his first military command of 2019: that “all military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle.”

China’s armed forces must “prepare for a comprehensive military struggle from a new starting point,” Xi said adding that “preparation for war and combat must be deepened to ensure an efficient response in times of emergency.”

Xi’s order prioritizes training with a focus on combat readiness, drills, troop inspections and resistance exercises.

It applies to all units of the PLA, including troops, academies and armed police, and is designed to “ensure new challenges are met and battles are won,” according to a copy of the guidelines seen during the television report.

In other words, Xi just ordered the Chinese military to prepare for war.

According to the South China Morning Post, the order “will kick-start a year of enhanced military training and exercises.” Which, of course, will build on the expansive military exercises carried out in 2018, where China flexed its military muscle in the South China Sea and Strait of Taiwan to show foreign powers that might support Taiwanese independence (i.e. the US) that China still takes the “One China” policy very, very seriously.

In addition to prioritizing training for military readiness, the CMC issued a separate set of guidelines intended to boost morale, affirming that military personnel would be promoted on the basis of merit while promising greater leniency and understanding for mistakes made during training.

As one Chinese “military expert” quoted by the SCMP pointed out, the order was probably intended as a warning to foreign powers who might try to interfere in its affairs.

Shanghai-based military expert Ni Lexiong said the recent “high-profile gestures” were probably intended as a warning to those who sought to obstruct the mainland’s plans for the reunification of Taiwan.

“[They] show how seriously Xi is taking China’s military training and its preparations for war, while also flexing its strength,” he said.

A former PLA officer was more explicit: a retired PLA colonel Yue Gang said that as well as the rising tensions between Beijing and Taipei, Xi’s rallying call to the military was a response to the growing uncertainty over the geopolitical struggle between China and the United States.

“China is increasing its military training so that it has the best solutions for the worst outcomes, either related to the US or across the [Taiwan] strait,” he said.

“Over the coming year, the US might use Taiwan and the South China Sea as bargaining chips to get what it wants from China with regards to the trade war,” he said.

“And there is always the possibility of increased independence calls from Taiwan.”

Despite these explicit warnings and military ambitions, we are confident that in the eyes of the market and general population, the prospects for a prolonged “trade war” with China will remain completely distinct from speculation about the possibility of a hot war – that is, until it’s too late to heed the warnings from US military personnel in the Pacific, who have been outspoken about the threat posed by the Chinese and their growing military ambitions.

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French authorities have arrested a key organizer of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement for leading an unauthorized demonstration, signaling a crackdown on the anti-government demonstrators after nearly two months of violence-filled protests. 

Eric Drouet, a truck driver from the suburbs of Paris, was arrested in Paris on Wednesday evening near the iconic Champs-Élysées avenue – a prime location for the yellow vests to gather. Drouet was detained while leading a commemoration of yellow vests who have died since the movement’s inception, most of whom were hit by cars during protests at roundabouts throughout the country, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

“The arrest and detention of Mr. Drouet is completely unjustified and arbitrary,” said Drouet’s attorney in a Thursday statement. 

The coming weeks will test whether Mr. Macron’s government can stop the protests, which have slowed the French economy and are undermining his plans for a free-market overhaul of France. Participation waned during the holiday season, but yellow vests are organizing new demonstrations this Saturday in Paris and elsewhere. Protesters continue to camp out at roundabouts across the countryside.

The government has struggled to contain the grass-roots movement, which has no organized leadership and has refused to declare demonstrations to the authorities as required by French law.

Mr. Drouet has emerged as one of its most high-profile members, appearing in the media frequently and calling for protests on Facebook. Mr. Drouet called for Wednesday evening’s commemoration, giving the authorities an opening to detain him. –WSJ

The yellow vest protests began as a demonstration against a climate change fuel tax, and quickly spread throughout France as a widespread rejection of French President Emmanuel Macron and his administration. Rioting yellow vests have clashed with police nearly every weekend since the protests began, with upscale Paris neighborhoods experiencing shattered storefronts and burning cars. 

The movement has forced Mr. Macron to reverse course on some key policies, including the suspension of a new fuel tax that prompted the protests. Raising the purchasing power of France’s working class—a key demand of the yellow vests—has vaulted to the top of the political agenda.

Mr. Macron’s concessions have helped drain some public support for the yellow vests, but polls late in December showed they retained the backing of 70% of the French public. –WSJ

Thousands of yellow vests have been arrested, straining the French judicial system. 

Many of the yellow vests want the Macron administration to reimpose the wealth tax, which was repealed for all taxes except real estate. Others want yellow vest candidates in the upcoming European elections – a possibility supported by nearly 50% of those polled by Harris Interactive. 

Macron’s crappy approval rating has taken a toll on his administration – with one of his closest advisers, Sylvain Fort, resigning on Thursday for personal reasons. Fort worked on Macron’s election campaign, helping sell the French public on the former investment banker in a surprise victory. He transitioned into a role as communications adviser at the Élysée Palace, where he has been unable to mitigate the rapid drop in the French president’s popularity. 

Surely arresting a key leader of the yellow vest movement will calm things down. 

Très excité…

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Authored by Matthew Jamison via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ has been known to exist as a close alliance between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since the days of FDR and Churchill forged during the Second World War. It is called special because of the unique historical and cultural bonds of kinship that unite the American and British peoples through a perceived shared heritage, common political/social/economic values and language. Together over the course of 72 years it has been the White House with the support of 10 Downing Street as its principal strategic leading ally in Europe.

The so-called ‘Special Relationship’ is an unprecedented coming together and sharing of two nation states intelligence and national security infrastructures and spy-intelligence organisations. The US-UK relationship is highly integrated at an intelligence, defence, foreign policy and security level. As well as being two highly developed, mature, sophisticated economies that do a tremendous amount of trade and investment with each other there are cultural affinities with a shared language and common ancestry.

At a political level the relationship between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is an institution of the Anglo-American special relationship and the poster child of it. When it has been good and based on mutual admiration and mutual chemistry with a strong bond of friendship such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair with Bill Clinton and George W Bush, John F Kennedy and Harold Macmillan and FDR together with in war time arms Churchill it has served to create an aura of confidence and glamour as well as excitement in the conduct of Western global leadership under the American order. Low points included the evident cold body language and distaste Edward Heath had for Richard Nixon.

Also Harold Wilson fell out with President Johnson regarding not having British involvement in the Vietnam War. British Conservative Prime Minister John Major did not get on well with American liberal ‘New’ Democrat President Bill Clinton regarding differing positions on the Irish peace process and Northern Ireland as well as Major helping Republican George Bush during the 1992 Presidential Election.

Now, quite possibly the US-UK “special relationship” has suffered serious damage and could be at its lowest ebb ever, which will have tremendous consequences for the UK’s position in the world going forward outside of the European Union. The relationship and alliance has always meant far more to London than to Washington DC. But in so heavily involving the British intelligence services in interfering in the 2016 US Presidential election directly working against the Republican candidate Donald Trump and in favour of the Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, the British State may just have crossed a red line to far in the mind of President Donald Trump.

There has been much banging on about Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. This of course is never spoken of in the context that various American and British Governments have not only covertly interfered and intervened directly in other countries internal democratic elections and political systems such as the case with the British Conservative Government of John Major attempting to help the Republican Bush 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, but also overtly, such as was the case with Iran after WWII. However, the more one learns of the extent of the British intelligence state’s involvement in the 2016 US Presidential election working in favour of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, the more one begins to see that an argument can be mounted that the level of British State intervention in the 2016 US Presidential election to help tip the balance in favour of one candidate against the other is unprecedented.

Such is the case of one British political ‘activist’ by the name of Simon Bracey-Lane who mysteriously worked as an activist for the Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential campaign and a very strange organisation called The Institute of Statecraft which runs something spuriously called the ‘Integrity Initiative’. The Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative is a front for the British Government’s intelligence services. It is funded largely by the British Foreign Office and NATO Governments. It came into being in 2015 long before Donald Trump was ever perceived to be a serious candidate for the White House and its sole purpose is to continue in that most ridiculous and backwards ‘Cold War’ mentality of smearing all things Russian and smearing anyone who takes a positive interest and positive perspective on Russia and the great Russian people.

It would seem Bracey-Lane was an agent of the British Government on a mission to collect up data on Bernie Sanders, the chief rival for the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton back in 2016 and then in all likelihood pass such data to the 2016 Clinton Campaign. The British Government at the time at made it known it wanted Hillary Clinton elected President. Senator Sanders was of course a left wing firebrand, the closest American politics gets to having a socialist, who was lukewarm towards Israel and intent on revolutionising American domestic and international policy to take it in a more progressive and liberal internationalist direction. Sanders wanted to reform the bloated US defence budget and military-industrial complex and attempt to tone down aggressive impulses in American foreign policy. With a little extra push in a few primaries and caucus he might well have secured the Democratic Party nomination.

This involvement by the British State in the internal political affairs of the United States is disconcerting. Not only did the British State intervene extensively in the 2016 US Presidential election to tip the balance towards the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, it has at the same time being displaying a deeply ingrained prejudice and bigotry against all things Russian. Indeed, over the last few years the level of anti-Russian hysteria in England alongside the level of anti-EU hysteria has been an appalling and irrational spectacle to behold. Even in English police stations they now have posters up about how to look out for ‘Russian gangs’ etc. which is absolute rubbish, but then the English police are themselves utterly rubbish, as the world has witnessed recently with the disgraceful bungling of the Gatwick Airport drone fiasco. The English really need to calm down and focus on their own internal affairs such as the mess they have created for themselves with this thing of theirs called Brexit.

This British Government front called the Institute for Statecraft and its ‘Integrity Initiative’ was launched in 2015 by the British Government as a secret operation to propagate anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream and create generally an aggressively hostile anti-Russian media narrative, for what purpose and to what end only the British Government and those who hold such severe and obsessive anti-Russian opinions can answer.

The Institute for Statecraft and its ‘Integrity Initiative’ programs where designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russia line. The Steele dossier which has been of such great help to the Robert Mueller Special Counsel Investigation was also a largely a British Government operation but seems to have actually emanated from this Institute for Statecraft mission. The ‘Integrity Initiative’ builds ‘cluster’ or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take anti-Russian action when the British State perceives a need.

It would seem there are some at the very highest levels of the British State who would like nothing more than to start an all out war against Russia, which would be the gravest strategic and human mistake probably made since the last monster thought he could achieve such a diabolical scheme circa 1941. And perhaps there are some at the top of the EU who have never forgiven nor gotten over that it was Russia that was the main liberator of the European continent against the German Nazi Third Reich and it was Russia who was the principle and superior opponent against the Wehrmacht.

Yet the fact of the matter is as per usual when the English are involved they generally end up causing more damage than good. All these anti-Russian efforts by the British State and involvement in the internal affairs of American politics such as infiltrating the Bernie Sanders campaign and gathering up a dossier on Donald Trump has ironically and paradoxically served to actually weaken to its worst level the US-UK ‘special relationship’. Quite possibly US-UK relations are at their lowest point. The management of the President of the United States’ visit to the UK was a public relations disaster for the British Government of Theresa May and Mr. Trump has made it quite clear he has little time for the British Prime Minister, openly attacking her handling of the Brexit negotiations, openly pining for Boris Johnson to replace her and openly stating that a US-UK Free Trade Agreement post-Brexit is not a certainty. Also President Trump has little time for Britain’s defence establishment and its pathetic and ridiculous Henry Jackson Society so-called Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. President Trump cannot stand pip squeaks like Gavin Williamson and that is why Trump kept the entire British Government in the dark about his troop pull outs in Syria and Afghanistan.

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The German government has mounted an aggressive campaign to encourage illegal migrants to leave – bribing them with free rent for a year in their home countries. 

“Your country. Your future. Now!” read billboards in seven languages, plastered in nearly 2,500 locations across 80 German cities, reports the National Post. 

A series of flags corresponding with the top-destinations – Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Russia – shapes a zigzagging road to a fictional horizon.

The “ReturningfromGermany” ad campaign is the latest tactic by the German government to boost departures and deter migration, in a reversal of Angela Merkel’s controversial welcoming policy of 2015 at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. The campaign is the brainchild of  interior minister Horst Seehofer, Merkel’s rebellious right-wing rival, who forced a coalition crisis over Germany’s asylum policy last summer. –National Post

As rejected asylum claims pile up – and arrivals have normalized since a flood of 700,000 migrants three years ago, the billboard campaign is aimed at the roughly 235,000 people who are still required to leave the country according to the interior ministry. 

Most asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected can’t return to their country of origin due for several reason; danger, lack of documentation or they suffer from an illness. The German government has dubbed these people “duldung,” which means “tolerated.” 

Denied asylum seekers who don’t fit either of those categories typically don’t show up for their deportation. Of more than 20,000 scheduled airport repatriations in 2018, just half of them appeared to take flights back home. 

Seehofer, the German interior minister, aims to encourage migrants to leave with the cash-giveaway billboard campaign – offering 1,000 – 1,200 euros for a single person and 3,000 for families to provide for basic needs. 

Not everyone is a fan of the new “stepping stone system,” in which “you get more money if you choose to leave earlier on,” according to Meiki Riebau – a lawyer and migration expert at Save the Children Germany. 

Riebau – who is not a fan of the campaign, says “It’s a tasteless Christmas present.” 

Depending on their nationality, asylum seekers can receive 1,200 euros if they return before the asylum procedure is completed; which drops to 800 after a rejected claim. But the 800 still beckons if they decide to depart voluntarily within 30 days.

The backlash against the billboards and the campaign has swollen quickly. Many have been painted over with one-liners such as “All migrants welcome”. More than 30,000 people have signed the petition “Your future without Horst” in response – calling out their minister for bargaining an uncertain future at Christmas.

“It’s insensitive and a very bad deal: 1,000 euros will not make anyone go anywhere if they don’t have a future,” says petition founder Hannah Huebner. The billboards have also had an unintended side-effect: The ad doesn’t specify the target group clearly, causing irritation and confusion among Germany’s migrant population at large – currently estimated at 15 per cent. –National Post

“The Turkish flag on the poster is particularly difficult. Many Turks have been here for decades,” said Huebner.

Perhaps the cash incentive will turn out to be more successful than Britain’s approach when Prime Minister Theresa May had vans drive through neighborhoods with billboards reading “Go home or face arrest.” Her initiative resulted in just 11 voluntary departures. 

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Authored by Douglas Murray via The Gatestone Institute,

• In November, it was reported that the Pakistani Christian mother of five, Asia Bibi, was unlikely to be offered asylum by the British government due to concerns about “community” relations in the UK. What this means is that the UK government was worried that Muslims of Pakistani origin in Britain may object to the presence in the UK of a Christian woman who has spent most of the last decade on death row in Pakistan, before being officially declared innocent of a trumped-up charge of “blasphemy”.

• One person who has had no trouble being in London is Dr Ataollah Mohajerani, Iran’s former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Mohajerani is best known for his book-length defence of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the British novelist Salman Rushdie.

• This week we learned that the UK government has allowed in a man called Brahim Belkaid, a 41-year old of German origin, believed to have inspired up to 140 people to join al-Qaeda and ISIS. His Facebook messages have included messages with bullets and a sword on them saying, “Jihad: the Only Solution”.

• It is almost as though the UK government has decided that while extremist clerics can only rarely be banned, critics of such clerics can be banned with ease. The problem is that the trend for taking a laxer view of extremists than of their critics keeps on happening.

Britain’s idea of who should be allowed to travel to the country (and stay) looks ever more perverse. One person who had no trouble immigrating to the UK is Dr Ataollah Mohajerani, Iran’s former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, who wrote a book-length defence of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. Pictured: Salman Rushdie in 2015. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)

The British government’s idea of who is — and who is not — a legitimate asylum seeker becomes stranger by the month.

In November it was reported that the Pakistani Christian mother of five, Asia Bibi, was unlikely to be offered asylum by the British government due to concerns about “community” relations in the UK. What this means is that the UK government was worried that Muslims of Pakistani origin in Britain may object to the presence in the UK of a Christian woman who has spent most of the last decade on death row in Pakistan, before being officially declared innocent of a trumped-up charge of “blasphemy”.

Yet, as Asia Bibi – surely one of the people in the world most needful of asylum in a safe country – continues to fear for her life in her country of origin, Britain’s idea of who should be allowed to travel to the country (and stay) looks ever more perverse.

One person, for instance, who has had no trouble being in London is Dr Ataollah Mohajerani, Iran’s former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Mohajerani is best known for his book-length defence of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwaagainst the British novelist Salman Rushdie. After the Khomeini’s call on the world’s Muslims to kill Rushdie for writing a novel, Mohajerani wrote a 250-page book, A Critique of the Conspiracy of The Satanic Verses, which justified the death-sentence. For more than a decade, however, apparently fallen out with part of the regime in Iran, Mohajerani has been living in Harrow, where he intermittently keeps up his campaign against Rushdie.

We have also seen time and again how extremist clerics such as the Pakistani clerics Muhammad Naqib ur Rehman and Hassan Haseen ur Rehman have been allowed to enter the UK despite their track records of supporting the murder of people merely suspected of having blasphemed against, or apostasised from, Islam. Nevertheless, while the UK government continues to allow clerics such as these to enter Britain, it develops an ever-growing banned list of people who are not Muslim but who have been critical of aspects of Islam. It is almost as though the UK government has decided that while extremist clerics can only rarely be banned, critics of such clerics can be banned with ease.

Some people might say that as it is 30 years since Mohajerani wrote his book justifying the murder of a British citizen, we should all let bygones be bygones — as though advocating murder is the sort of thing anyone might do in a moment of weakness. The problem is that the trend for taking a laxer view of extremists than of their critics keeps on happening. The Canadian blogger Lauren Southern may not be allowed into the UK because she constitutes a threat to public order. Yet, this week we learned that the UK government has allowed in a man called Brahim Belkaid, a 41-year old of German origin, believed to have inspired up to 140 people to join al-Qaeda and ISIS. The British press this week discovered that he was able to settle in Leicester nearly five years ago after returning from Syria, where he is suspected of having supported terrorist groups. It does not appear that Belkaid has used his time in the UK to lie low or mull over his past mistakes. As his activities on the streets and on social media attest, he has in fact been openly continuing to preach and recruit for his radical version of Islam.

As The Times reported this week, Belkaid was photographed handing out hardline translations of the Quran to fans celebrating the local football team’s victory in Leicester in 2016. He has also used his social media presence to call for the destruction of the USA and to promote his own extremist views as well as the views of other extremists like him.

His Facebook messages have included messages with bullets and a sword on them saying, “Jihad: the Only Solution”. In another post, he poses smilingly with one arm on a carton of washing powder labelled “ISIS”. By any analysis it is clear that Belkaid is doing in Britain precisely what he was doing in Germany.

There are several possible explanations for how such an insane policy could continue to operate in the UK. The first is that the British government does not know what it is doing, and that while it is unbelievably good at spotting Canadian bloggers who it thinks might pose some risk, it is just less adept at recognising the names, faces and backgrounds of well-known ISIS recruiters. That is one explanation. But it is the sort of explanation — known in Britain as a “cock-up theory” — which begins to run dry as a pattern develops. After all, to have allowed in one jihadist may look like an accident, to keep on letting them in looks like carelessness. Moreover, that this goes in tandem with the extreme strictness applied by the UK government to any critics of Islam who may be trying to enter the UK begins to look like a policy.

It is also possible that this is a policy decision. The British government may honestly have come to the conclusion that while Islamist extremism is a containable problem, the possibility of wider public “radicalisation” against elements of the Muslim community in the UK and worldwide is a much more serious one. To put it another way, they may have decided that the terrorist attacks in Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge, Borough Market, Woolwich and elsewhere are unlikely to be repeated, while Darren Osborne’s solitary attack on worshippers coming out of Finsbury Park Mosque last year is part of a pattern.

Other than the “cock-up theory” or a general (if misguided) policy decision, it is hard to see what else is going on here. The decisions that keep being revealed to have been made by the UK border agency and the whole asylum and immigration policy of the UK government are so inexplicable that they are precisely the sort of thing to give rise to the most fevered and fetid conspiracy theories — such as that politicians and civil servants are more afraid of being accused of “racism” than of letting Islamic extremists loose in the country. If the UK government wants to avert the spread of such conspiracy claims, it should act hard and fast. Specifically, it should be able to crack down hard to prevent people like Belkaid from being allowed to reside here. Curtailing such easy, open-and-shut cases would do an enormous amount to reassure the British public and to persuade us that although the UK’s border agencies may not be perfect, at least they are not suicidal.

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Authored by M.K.Bhadrakumar via The Indian Punchline,

Armageddon: Will it come on Trump’s watch?

Is 2019 going to be the year of the Armageddon? The answer is a definitive ‘No’. As 2018 ended, the potential for war was looming and Russian President Vladimir Putin even refused to rule out a nuclear war. But then, the statesmen grappling with international security also know that nukes are useless. They serve the purpose of deterrence but cannot be used as offensive weapons.

In fact, the nearest we came to a nuclear flashpoint was during last year over North Korea. But that point is well behind us. North Korea is no longer considered as a great threat to global security – although it is fairly clear by now, thanks to satellite imagery and other reports, that claims that Pyongyang was shutting down its nuclear weapons testing must be taken with a pinch of salt. Defusing the crisis with North Korea stands out as President Trump’s most successful summit diplomacy so far.

Coming back to Russia’s tensions with the West, no one thinks of the likelihood of the tensions cascading to a doomsday, either. Putin’s startling remark can be put in perspective. These days, what is uppermost on his mind is the planned US exit from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Putin has repeatedly warned that if the US scuttles the INF Treaty, it would trigger a Russian response.

Suffice to say, when Putin made the seemingly ominous remark lamenting that the global fears of a nuclear war have ebbed, he had a political agenda to draw attention to the growing instability due to the tensions in Russia’s relations with the West and the ensuing great depletion of a common agenda apropos international security today. What Putin implied was that if the relations continue to be in free fall, a point may come when the situation regarding nuclear weapons may spin out of control. As a Russian analyst noted, “Putin believes that nuclear weapons are Russia’s ultimate argument that should influence Western politicians’ thinking.”

However, the likelihood of western sanctions against Russia getting lifted in 2019 is practically nil. Russia has survived the sanctions but they have and are taking a heavy toll on the Russian economy. Apart from limiting imports of Western energy and other technologies, Russia’s access to international capital markets remains blocked and international investors feel discouraged to have dealings in Russia.

Indeed, Russia’s “pivot” to China is an outcome of the western sanctions and the political relations with China are at their highest level at present. The mutual trust at the leadership level is unprecedented and in overall terms, China remains Russia’s largest and strategically most significant partner in Asia.

Nonetheless, as an influential Moscow pundit wrote recently, “It’s no secret that amidst the war in the financial sector that the United States is waging against Russia, Chinese companies and banks were in no hurry to create mechanisms to bypass these (western) sanctions. Often they refused to work with Russian clients, which contrasts with the highest level of political relations between the countries and the mutual trust of their leaders… In this regard… the exacerbation of the face-off between China and the United States could be both a boon and a bane for Russia’s foreign policy.”

In the final analysis, an improvement of Russia’s relations with the US will depend on the conclusion of the ongoing inquiry on Trump’s alleged “Russia collusion.” The possibility of such a thing happening cannot be ruled out. At any rate, the chances of the inquiry getting carried over to 2020 appear rather slim. But, on the other hand, 2020 also promises to be a turbulent election year in US politics, which precludes a controversial foreign policy initiative such as on a radical improvement of relations with Russia on Trump’s part.

Equally, Candidate Trump’s campaign for a second term in the 2020 November presidential election will also prevent any sharp deterioration in the US-China relations through 2019. The two countries are almost certainly coming to an accommodation on the trade disputes and related issues. Maintaining economic interdependence with the US is important for China’s economic growth. Thus, Beijing may address the crux of the “trade war” – its ambitious Make in China 2015 plan, which has become a bone of contention for the Trump administration.

A change to China’s manufacturing blueprint cannot be ruled out. Some policymakers in Beijing have signaled that that the MIC 2025 program could be replaced with a new vision that one the one hand encourages foreign investment while on the other hand drop its previous market share targets devolving upon domination by Chinese companies – in short, diluted to reflect key concessions to the US critics.

Arguably, even the 2025 timeline might be pushed back. Of course, this will not mean that Beijing will abandon its quest for developing indigenous advanced technology or for reducing its reliance on Western know-how, but, simply put, new industrial goals may be set discreetly under the rubric of China’s ongoing structural reforms.

There have been reports that Beijing may likely announce fair competition norms for state-owned, private, and foreign enterprises based on the market-oriented concept of “competitive neutrality” that ensures level playing field to Chinese and foreign participants.

Equally, it must be noted that the Trump administration should be aware that a trade war with China in an election year is not desirable. Quite obviously, the supply glut in the US market for soybeans already makes a telling political story.

China is not in the least interested in a New Cold War with the US. A senior Chinese diplomat last weekend even called for a “responsible” US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “They [US] have been in Afghanistan for 17 years. If they are leaving the country, they should try to leave in a gradual and a responsible way,” said Lijian Zhao, deputy Chinese ambassador in Islamabad, while speaking to the Pakistani television.

Lijian added, “If a civil war broke out after the U.S. withdrawal, the first countries affected will be Pakistan, will be China, and it will be the immediate neighbors. So, we have to sit together with the parties concerned so that we start a peace process.” The Chinese diplomat admitted that Beijing worries about the East Turkestan Islamic Movement using Afghanistan as base to foment violence in Xinjiang. Lijian said, “They are still in Afghanistan. They are still posing a threat to the national security of Xinjiang, of China. What they want is to establish a separate state, to separate Xinjiang out of China. This is totally unacceptable to China. So, we will work with the Afghan government to try to eliminate this group.” (VOA)

No matter the Chinese motivations, it will get noted in Washington that Beijing will not gang up with Moscow and Tehran to act as a spoiler and derail the Afghan peace talks that the quadripartite group of US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Pakistan is promoting.

The bottom line is that China is not breaking international rules or order. Nor can China be isolated, given the high degree of integration of its economic system into the world economy. “If the US fights with China, it will lose more allies. Nobody wants to choose sides. Everybody wants to stand by… China cannot leave the world, and the world cannot leave China. So, you can’t isolate China. This is very different from the Soviet Union,” to quote veteran China hand Ambassador Charles Freeman in a recent interview.

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In a speech marking 40 years since the improvement in ties with Taiwan, Chinese President Xi Jinping has has once again called for peaceful reunification, also warning that China reserves the the right to use force.

Although it is self-governed and de-facto independent, Taiwan has never formally declared independence. Xi also said that reunification is “an inevitable requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” and that his government “reserves the option of taking all necessary measures” against outside interference with peaceful reunification.

As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Xi’s comments are in line with China’s long-standing policy on the issue and it is generally regarded as one of the greatest flashpoints in relations between Beijing and Washington.

Despite the improvement in ties in recent years, China has never ruled out the possibility of invasion and it has continued acquiring the military capability to do so. Regional tensions have also grown due to China’s territorial claims and aspirations in the South China Sea, something which has prompted Japan to cast aside its postwar pacifism.

Even though the possibility of China taking Taiwan by force is low, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait is firmly in China’s favor…

The following infographic provides an overview of that imbalance and it is based on an annual U.S. government report.

You will find more infographics at Statista

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Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

In my last article, ‘The Fed Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda’, I explored and dismantled recent propaganda surrounding the Federal Reserve’s tightening actions, including the propaganda that Jerome Powell is some kind of rogue central banker who is rebalancing the system for the good of the nation.  To summarize the points made in that article:

The Fed deliberately created the “Everything Bubble” so that it could be deliberately imploded at the proper time – in other words, the crash we have been witnessing so far during the final quarter of 2018 and continuing into 2019 is a controlled demolition of the economy.  Jerome Powell is not some “rebel” going against the easy money dictates of the Fed.  Jerome Powell is playing the role that has been given to him.  Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen’s job was to inflate the bubble.  Jerome Powell’s job is to crash the bubble.

This is a tactic used by the Fed and the globalists that run it for over 100 years – conjure a debt bubble, deflate the debt bubble, cause a crisis, siphon up hard assets for pennies on the dollar, use the panic to gain more power and centralization, introduce new control measures while everyone is distracted, rinse, repeat.

This process of controlled demolition needs a considerable distraction so that the central banks and the globalists ultimately avoid blame for the painful consequences of the event. 

Enter Donald Trump and the false Trump vs. Globalist paradigm. 

As I mentioned last week, the Fed is only one side of the equation for the crash; Trump is the other side.

Confidence games are highly varied affairs. They can be extremely simple and often obvious to everyone but the most inept and unobservant, or, they can be highly complex with many moving parts of deceit combined into a single elaborate con-machine. It is important to understand that confidence games are not just a means to steal money or valuables from unwitting people; they are also a vital part of economic manipulation, government dominance, and warfare in general. Almost all mainstream economic “authorities,” politicians, military tacticians and covert operatives are con men in one way or another.

With the exception of military tacticians acting in defense against an aggressor, con men are predominantly sociopaths. In order to carry out a “grift” against innocent people, an extreme lack of empathy is required. Understanding the mind and motivations of sociopaths and narcissistic sociopaths makes it possible to identify them faster and allows us to see their con games ahead of time.

In terms of social control, elitist con men are highly preoccupied with preventing spontaneous organization of rebellion. But this does not always involve the outright crushing of dissent. Instead, the elites prefer to use co-option and misdirection (con games) to lure rebellious movements to focus on the wrong enemy, or to trust the wrong leadership.

I am often reminded of the infiltration of the Tea Party movement by neo-conservatives in the years after the 2008 election. Neo-con-men exploited the desire among Tea Party activists for mainstream legitimacy and more widespread media coverage. They gave the activists what they wanted, by injecting their own political puppets into the movement. It did not take long for the Tea Party to abandon its initial roots in individual sovereignty and the Ron Paul campaign and adopt a decidedly statist tone. The smart people left the movement early and went on to launch their own efforts, but the goal of the establishment had been accomplished — the grass roots organized threat of the Tea Party was no more.

That said, the principles of conservative economics, small government and personal liberty remain entrenched in the American psyche and continue to grow. These ideals have a life of their own, and almost seem to act autonomously at times from any particular group or leader.

The single most important dynamo behind the rise of sovereignty activism has actually been the liberty media, or what some might call the “alternative media.” This group of people has been working tirelessly for years to inform the masses on the REAL news and data behind global events. Over time we have earned the trust of millions based on honest reporting and accurate predictions. It was only a matter of time before the establishment attempted to co-opt us as well…

The downfall of the Tea Party was a lack of cohesive leadership. There was no one there to put a stop to the neo-con infiltration. There was no one in a strong enough position to vet incoming influencers and prevent poison pills from entering the bloodstream of the movement. The problem with leadership, though, is that it denotes centralization and a bottlenecking of decisions and action. It’s quite a quandary for advocates of decentralization.

The most effective method for the establishment to sabotage a rebellion is to place one of their own puppets into a leadership position in that rebellion. This exploits the movement’s subconscious appetite for top down leadership. It neutralizes activists by tricking them into waiting for orders from on high instead of acting on their own individually. It makes a movement lazy and impotent.

The con game of false leadership goes beyond this, though. A charismatic puppet leader can trick activists into following a path completely opposite of their foundational ideals. He can turn the movement into something they would have originally despised (like turning a limited government pro-sovereignty movement into a big government pro-state cult). He can also take actions which are self-destructive, thereby making the movement appear insane or foolhardy by proxy.

I warned of this potential dynamic with Donald Trump long before the 2016 election. In fact, I predicted that Donald Trump would win the election based on the premise that the globalists were planning a grand con; to not only use Trump as a scapegoat for the crash of the “everything bubble” they had been inflating for the past 10 years, but to also use him as a pied piper to lure conservative movements into individual inaction, as well as being named as co-conspirators in the economic collapse that Trump was about to be involved in.

In my article ‘Clinton vs. Trump And The Co-Option Of The Liberty Movement,’ published in September 2016, I noted:

“To summarize, the elites need a patsy for the breakdown of the financial system they have engineered. That patsy will not be Trump per se, but conservatives in general. Whether Donald Trump is aware of this program or not, I do not know. I have no hard evidence indicating that Trump is anti-constitution; then again, I don’t have much evidence indicating he is pro-constitution. All I have at present to go by is his rhetoric, and rhetoric counts for nothing.

What I do know is that triggering a fiscal crisis under the watch of Trump and blaming conservatives is far more useful to the elites than triggering a crisis under Clinton and risk blame falling on international banking syndicates.”

The crash has now begun in the final quarter of 2018, with housing markets, auto markets and credit markets in steep decline, as well as stock markets trending into bear territory. In the same article I also stated:

“I believe Clinton is meant to lose. If this is the case and Trump is inaugurated in January of next year, the liberty movement needs to ask itself if Trump is truly an obstacle for the elites, or if he is an ally to the elites.

The Left is already salivating over the possibility that the Trump campaign will devour the liberty movement and turn it into something unrecognizable. Just take a gander at this editorial from Bloomberg called ‘The Tea Party Meets Its Maker,’ which announces the death of the “Tea Party” at the hands of Trump…”

After two years of witnessing Trump in action, it is clear to me that he is an active participant in the new world order agenda, and not just an unwitting patsy for the economic crisis.

Trump started out his presidential campaign with two very important issues. First, he argued for the need to “drain the swamp” in Washington D.C.; which included a sharp criticism of Hillary Clinton’s ties to banking elites and globalists. Second, he criticized the fraudulent state of the U.S. economy, pointing out that the stock market was in a massive bubble created by the Federal Reserve using near zero interest rates.

Trump’s first action upon entering the White House was to invite multiple “swamp creatures” into his cabinet, going against his core campaign promise. This was not all that surprising considering his past.

Trump was saved in the 1990s by Rothchild banking agent Wilber Ross, who bailed him out of his debts tied up in his failing Taj Mahal casino. Wilber Ross is now Trump’s commerce secretary. I ask, who is Trump going to be loyal to? The American people, who can offer him nothing of consequence, or the Rothschilds, who saved his public image and his billion-dollar empire?

Trump is also currently “advised” by the likes of Steven Mnuchin formerly of Goldman Sachs, Larry Kudlow formerly of the New York Fed, and John Bolton of the CFR, among others.

Trump has since flip-flopped on his economic position. Instead of warning about the huge financial bubble the Fed had created, he adopted a Twitter campaign TAKING CREDIT for the bubble for the past two years.

Some people will argue that Trump has placed blame on the Fed and exposed their operations, but this is theater based on selective observations.  Trump continues to set himself up as the fulcrum or source of the current crash.  Just this week his administration called the market decline a “little glitch” which would be solved once a trade deal with China was solidified.  In other words, Trump is saying the trade war is the cause of the crash, not the Fed.  Trump then at the same time blames the Fed.

Confusing?  Not really, when you understand that Trump is part of a grand con game.

If Trump was truly interested in bringing down the globalists, then he would not be consistently providing them with such perfect cover for their crimes.  I have been warning for the past year that the trade war is a perfect distraction for the public as the Fed unwinds QE and raises interest rates to kill the Everything Bubble.  Trump continues to attach his administration to stock market performance while also blaming stock declines on his own trade conflicts with China.  But what about Trump’s supposed battle with the Fed?  It’s all wrestle-mania.

As the stock rally crumbled in the final quarter of 2018, the script that Trump would follow in response was also rather predictable.

In my article ‘In A Battle Between Trump And The Fed, Who Really Wins,’ published in February 2017, I reminded readers that the goal of the Fed is a controlled demolition of the U.S. economy and the dollar to open the door for the “global reset.” The reset is the event that the globalists hope will allow them to introduce a single global currency system and single world economy with the IMF and perhaps the BIS at the helm.

In my article ‘Trump vs. The Fed: America Sacrificed At The NWO Altar,’ I outlined the details of the con game. The globalists WANT to sacrifice the Fed and the dollar to make way for their new world order system, but they cannot do this in a vacuum. They need a distraction. Trump’s “battle with the fed” will likely escalate into a full-blown war. But Trump’s position against the Fed is not honorable.

According to the narrative, Trump is not going after the Fed because it has created the everything bubble and is now deliberately imploding it. Trump is going after the Fed because he wants the Fed to make the everything bubble even bigger by continuing to prop up a stock rally that Trump has attached to the success of his presidency. Trump will be painted as a spoiled baby in the mainstream, throwing a tantrum and attacking the “innocent” central bankers who were only trying to “normalize markets.”

In the meantime, the globalists can slowly kill the world reserve status of the dollar while avoiding the blame for the severe economic consequences this will produce. A conflict between the White House and the central bank will be presented as a sign that faith in U.S. debt and the longevity of the dollar is a bad bet. Foreign holders of dollars and T-bills, already quietly dumping these assets, will accelerate the decoupling. Trump’s trade war activities add to the distraction, creating a brilliant theater in which conservatives are conned into supporting a puppet leader on the verge of collapse, and confirming the crazed arguments against conservative principles in the minds of globalists and leftists.

The con game is to get liberty advocates to invest themselves fully in Trump, to the point that we end up owning every mistake he makes, and every disaster that is pinned on him. There is a concerted propaganda campaign targeting the liberty movement which is telling us that Trump is playing “4D Chess;” that Trump is planning a “coup” against the banking elites, that Trump is planning to bring down the Fed as a means to save the U.S., and even that Trump is working with Jerome Powell to crash the globalist system as a means to “restore the Republic.”

While Trump throws a bone to conservatives at times, including promises of a border wall, or a pull-out in Syria, there is no evidence to support the fantasy that Trump is some kind of ingenious tactician battling the the forces of evil using his wits while inside the system. But, there is considerable evidence as I have linked above supporting my position that Trump is controlled opposition working with the globalists to initiate a collapse that will be blamed on conservative ideals and limited government liberty activists. We shall see in due course. It is unfortunate though how many otherwise very intelligent people within the liberty movement have bought into Trump as a hero on a white horse.

The activists and alternative media are the real heroes. They are the people that pushed liberty philosophy into the mainstream. Trump merely rode the wave that they created. Even if he was a legitimate conservative and constitutionalist (which he is not), the movement doesn’t need his leadership. It never did. The globalists know this and hope to chain us to Trump as he sinks into historical oblivion, destroying us all in the process.

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The CIA isn’t the only federal agency making use of Amazon’s vast offerings – as the FBI has been testing the Seattle-based megacorp’s facial recognition software – Amazon Rekognition, as a potential method of scanning vast amounts of video surveillance footage which the agency routinely gathers during investigations. 

The pilot program was launched in early 2018 according to FBI officials, after several high-profile counterterrorism investigations which strained the FBI’s current technological capabilities, reports Nextgov.com. 

One example of the FBI’s struggle to keep up with data was during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada killed Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured 422. As part of the investigation, the FBI gathered a petabyte worth of data (one million gigabytes) – much of it comprising video from cellphones and surveillance cameras. 

“We had agents and analysts, eight per shift, working 24/7 for three weeks going through the video footage of everywhere Stephen Paddock was the month leading up to him coming and doing the shooting,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Christine Halvorsen, speaking from a Las Vegas Amazon Web Services conference in November. She described how the FBI has been using Amazon’s cloud platform to carry out counterterrorism probes – noting that Amazon Rekognition could have processed the same amount of data from the Las Vegas shooting “in 24 hours,” roughly three weeks faster than it took human FBI agents to find Paddock’s face amid a mountain of video evidence. 

“Think about that,” Halvorsen said, noting that technology like Amazon Rekognition frees up FBI agents and analysts to apply their skills to other aspects of the investigation or other cases.

“The cases don’t stop, the threats keep going,” Halvorsen added. “Being able to not pull people off that and have computers do it is very important.” –Nextgov.com

Amazon provides a significant number of services to the US government – primarily through its cloud business, AWS, which counts the Defense Department and the CIA among its customers. 

While it’s unclear how the facial recognition software may be used in the public sector, the Daily Beast reported in October that Amazon had pitched the software to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement last summer, which has resulted in both lawmakers and Amazon employees asking questions, according to Nextgov. 

The company does not list any federal clients on its customer page, and currently only identifies as a customer one local law enforcement agency, the Washington County Sheriff Office.

Once a customer, the city of Orlando canceled its own pilot of Amazon Rekognition last June after public outcry over civil liberties. –Nextgov.com

Just one question; is Rekognition racist?

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Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,

• The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system of nation states or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether.

• Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.

• The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing’s unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes, and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.

The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether. Pictured: Xi Jinping (center) at a Chinese Communist Party event on January 2, 2019 in Beijing. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein-Pool/Getty Images)

“I hear prominent Americans, disappointed that China has not become a democracy, claiming that China poses a threat to the American way of life,” Jimmy Carter wrote on the last day of 2018 in a Washington Post op-ed.

That claim, Carter tells us, is a “dangerous notion.”

There is nothing more dangerous than a notion from the 39th president, even on China. China, despite what he said, threatens not only America’s way of life but also the existence of the American republic. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has, in recent years, been making the extraordinary case that the U.S. is not a sovereign state.

The breathtaking position puts China’s aggressive actions into a far more ominous context.

Carter, and almost all others who comment on Chinese foreign policy, see Beijing competing for influence in the current international order. That existing order, accepted virtually everywhere, is based on the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which recognizes the sovereignty of individual states that are supposed to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs. Those states now compete and cooperate in a framework, largely developed after World War II, of treaties, conventions, covenants, and norms.

Many Chinese policymakers believe they are entitled to dominate others, especially peoples on their periphery. That concept underpinned the imperial tributary system in which states near and far were supposed to acknowledge Chinese rule. Although there is no “cultural DNA” that forces today’s communist leaders to view the world as emperors did long ago, the tributary system nonetheless presents, as Stephen Platt of the University of Massachusetts points out, “a tempting model” of “a nostalgic ‘half-idealized, half-mythologized past.’ “

In that past, there were no fixed national boundaries. There was even no concept of “China.” There was, as Yi-Zheng Lian wrote in the New York Times, “a sovereignty system with the emperor’s compound in the middle.” Around that were concentric rings. “The further from the center, the less the center’s control and one’s obligations to it,” Lian noted. The Chinese, in fact, were perhaps the first to develop the idea of a borderless world.

In short, Chinese emperors claimed they had the Mandate of Heaven over tianxia, or “All Under Heaven,” as they believed they were, in the words of Fei-Ling Wang of Georgia Tech, “predestined and compelled to order and rule the entire world that is known and reachable, in reality or in pretension.” As acclaimed journalist Howard French writes in Everything Under the Heavens, “One can argue that there has never been a more universal conception of rule.”

Unfortunately, the current Chinese leader harbors ambitions of imposing the tianxia model on others. As Charles Horner of the Hudson Institute told me, “The Communist Party of China remains committed to ordering the People’s Republic of China as a one-party dictatorship, and that is perforce its starting point for thinking about ordering the world.” In other words, a dictatorial state naturally thinks about the world in dictatorial terms. Tianxia is by its nature a top-down, dictatorial system.

Xi Jinping has employed tianxia language for more than a decade, but recently his references have become unmistakable. “The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven are one family,” he declared in his 2017 New Year’s Message. He recycled tianxia themes in his 2018 New Year’s message and hinted at them in his most recent one as well.

Xi has also used Chinese officials to explain the breathtaking scope of his revolutionary message. Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in Study Times, the Central Party School newspaper, in September 2017 wrote that Xi Jinping’s “thought on diplomacy”—a “thought” in Communist Party lingo is an important body of ideological work—”has made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.” Wang with his time reference is almost certainly pointing to the Westphalian system of sovereign states. His use of “transcended,” consequently, hints that Xi wants a world without sovereign states—or at least no more of them than China.

The trend of Xi’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether, trying to replace Westphalia’s cacophony with tianxia‘s orderliness.

Xi not only spouts tianxia-like statements, his regime also employs scholars to study the application of tianxia to the world.

He also acts tianxia. His China in December 2016 seized a U.S. Navy drone in international water in the South China Sea. Chinese spokesman Yang Yujun said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency, that one of its navy’s lifeboats “located an unidentified device” and retrieved it “to prevent the device from causing harm to the safety of navigation and personnel of passing vessels.”

In fact, China’s ships had over a long period tailed the USNS Bowditch, an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance vessel. The American crew, who at the time were trying to retrieve the drone, repeatedly radioed the Chinese sailors, who ignored their calls and, within 500 yards of the U.S. craft, went into the water in a small boat to seize it. The Chinese by radio told the Bowditch they were keeping the drone.

The site of the seizure, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, was so close to the shoreline of the Philippines that it was beyond China’s expansive “nine-dash line” claim. There was absolutely no justification for the Chinese navy to grab the drone. The intentional taking of what the Defense Department termed a “sovereign immune vessel” of the United States showed that Beijing thought it was not bound by any rules of conduct.

Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.

The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing’s unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.

China has been called a “trivial state,” one which seeks nothing more than “perpetuation of the regime itself and the protection of the county’s territorial integrity.” This view fundamentally underestimates the nature of the Chinese challenge. China, under Xi Jinping, has become a revolutionary regime that seeks not only to dominate others but also take away their sovereignty.

Xi at this moment cannot compel others to accept his audacious vision of a China-centric world, but he has put the world on notice.

These events together mean, once again, that Carter has failed to understand a hardline regime. In his op-ed, he warns America against starting “a modern Cold War” with China. Washington, in reality, cannot start anything. There already is a struggle that Xi Jinping has made existential.

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