" Ronald Reagan Just Saved Israel From Iran’s Attack."

" In 1986, Sen. Joe Biden mocked as ‘reckless’ the idea of defending against ballistic missiles."


By : Daniel Henninger ( April 18th , 2024 )

" Allow me to identify who saved the people of Israel last weekend from Iran’s missile barrage: Ronald Reagan.

In 1983, President Reagan in a televised speech proposed what he called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its core idea was that the U.S. would build defense systems that could shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, then expected to be fired by the Soviet Union at the U.S. mainland.

Democrats and much of the defense establishment mocked the idea, with Sen. Ted Kennedy naming it “Star Wars.” Sen. Joe Biden summed up the opposition in a 1986 speech to the National Press Club:

“Star Wars represents a fundamental assault on the concepts, alliances and arms-control agreements that have buttressed American security for several decades, and the president’s continued adherence to it constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”

By universal acclamation, the hero of last weekend was Israel’s missile-defense systems. The world watched in real time Saturday night as Reagan’s commitment to shooting down missiles protected Israel’s population from the more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles fired by Iran and its proxies at cities across Israel.

No nation more quickly recognized the necessity of missile defenses than Israel, a small, population-packed country that couldn’t afford the conceit of some U.S. politicians, then and today, that the American landmass is somehow safe from missile attacks. Within two years of Reagan’s announcement, Israel signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. to develop missile defenses. The fruits of that four-decade partnership couldn’t be clearer.

Though the U.S. didn’t develop a space-based system, the technology has enabled an arsenal of ground-, air- and sea-based interceptors. Israel—with a capable scientific establishment dedicated to the country’s survival—developed a multilayered missile-defense system. Iron Dome protects from short-range missiles of the sort fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah, which reportedly possesses more than 100,000 missiles and rockets of Iranian, Russian and Chinese origin. David’s Sling protects from short- to medium-range missiles, while the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems hit missiles at high altitudes.

Reagan’s experience with the Strategic Defense Initiative has lessons for the U.S. today, with the unmissable irony that ardent SDI foe Joe Biden is pocketing its political benefit this week.

Among the arguments against Reagan’s missile-defense plan was that it would “provoke a response” from the Soviets. SDI’s development got bogged down in the politics of arms-control negotiations between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Reagan’s critics, including a virtual media consensus, said SDI would make our own nuclear-missile arsenal less vulnerable, increasing the Soviet Union’s incentive to launch a pre-emptive first strike. Reagan insisted he wasn’t trying to protect missiles but the U.S. population.

If we have learned anything the past three years, it is that Mr. Biden is saturated in the don’t-provoke-a-response school of foreign policy.

He says Israel should “take the win” because retaliation risks provoking a wider war. Shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Mr. Biden allowed the expiration of a 2015 United Nations Security Council resolution prohibiting Iran from exporting missile and drone technology. However symbolic the resolution, the mullahs couldn’t have missed Mr. Biden’s stand-back approach.

From the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Biden has slow-walked sending military technology to Kyiv—long-range missiles, Patriot air-defense systems, tanks, fighter jets—for fear it would provoke Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Biden said he’d provide Ukraine with “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.” If he’d done that sooner than later, the technology-savvy Ukrainians could have avoided a frozen conflict and their support likely wouldn’t be stalled by Republican opposition in the House.

The Ukraine trench-war conflict, with Mr. Putin sacrificing Russian men on a massive scale, is likely an anomaly. More relevant to the future of war is the calculation by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that missiles will be the great equalizer, as Yemen’s ragtag Houthis have proved in the Red Sea.

By happenstance, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on U.S. missile defense Friday, hours before Iran launched its attack. The committee members, both Republicans and Democrats, had a prescient complaint, asking Pentagon officials about America’s underinvestment in its defense industrial base and why the Biden defense budget would cut some $400 million from the Missile Defense Agency. “I just don’t understand the rationale behind many of these cuts,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) said. It’s harder to understand this week.

Reagan’s missile-defense legacy does have an important advocate: Donald Trump. As president in 2019, Mr. Trump revived the U.S. missile-defense program, and he restated that commitment, citing Reagan, during this year’s New Hampshire primary.

Mr. Biden deserves credit for helping Israel repel Iran’s missiles and drones. It’s clear, though, that the world has entered a new era of state-sponsored missile attacks—first Russia into Ukraine and now Iran’s swarmed assault on Israel. To meet that threat, Mr. Biden would have to admit Reagan was right. That isn’t going to happen. "

[ Bill Wyman BABY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ]

Steel Wheels Tour 1989

Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, California, USA, 19 October 1989

01 Intro (Continental Drift)   (00:00:00)
02 Start Me Up   (00:01:45)
03 Bitch   (00:05:36)
04 Sad Sad Sad   (00:09:00)
05 Undercover Of The Night   (00:12:44)
06 Harlem Shuffle   (00:17:01)
07 Tumbling Dice   (00:21:23)
08 Miss You   (00:26:16)
09 Ruby Tuesday   (00:32:34)
10 Angie   (00:35:47)
11 Rock And A Hard Place   (00:39:18)
12 Mixed Emotions   (00:44:36)
13 Honky Tonk Women   (00:50:03)
14 Midnight Rambler   (00:54:32)
15 You Can't Always Get What You Want   (01:04:02)
16 Little Red Rooster   (01:11:59)
      (With Eric Clapton)
17 Before They Make Me Run   (01:18:04)
18 Happy   (01:22:02)
19 Paint It Black   (01:26:08)
20 Light Years From Home   (01:29:51)
21 Sympathy For The Devil   (01:35:49)
22 Gimme Shelter   (01:43:03)
23 It's Only Rock N Roll   (01:48:51)
24 Brown Sugar   (01:52:54)
25 (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction   (01:57:55
26 Jumping Jack Flash   (02:05:16)
27 Outro   (02:11:24)

Mick Jagger - Vocals
Keith Richards - Guitar
Charlie Watts - Drums
Ronnie Wood - Guitar
Bill Wyman - Bass
Matt Clifford - Keyboards
Lisa Fischer - Backing Vocals
Bernard Fowler - Backing Vocals
Bobby Keys - Saxophone
Chuck Leavell - Keyboards
Cindy Mizelle - Backing Vocals
The Uptown Horns:
Crispin Cioe - Saxophone
Bob Funk - Trombone
Arno Hecht - Saxophone
Paul Litteral - Trumpet

First show - March 9, 1976. This show stopped after Keith Moon passed out and couldn't continue.

1. I Can't Explain
2. Substitute - Keith Moon passes out, and they don't play anymore.

Second show - April 1, 1976. This is the makeup show.
3. I Can't Explain 
4. Substitute 
5. My Wife
6. Baba O'Riley 
7. Squeeze Box
8. Behind Blue Eyes
9. Dreaming From The Waist 
10. Magic Bus 
11. Amazing Journey
12. Sparks/Eyesight To The Blind 
13. The Acid Queen 
14. Fiddle About 
15. Pinball Wizard 
16. I'm Free 
17. Tommy's Holiday Camp 
18. We're Not Gonna Take It
19 See Me, Feel Me 
20. Summertime Blues * 
21. My Generation/Join Together *
22. Won't Get Fooled Again *

" Strategic intimacy: US seeks face-to-face rivalry with China. "

BY : LAURA KELLY - 04/20/24 2:00 PM ET

" President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping opened a new chapter in the superpower rivalry with their November meeting, embracing open lines of communication despite simmering tensions over competing geopolitical and economic interests. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing this coming week will spotlight how this strategy is holding firm almost five months later, despite unresolved issues and global conflicts threatening to break the relationship apart at any moment.

“We believe that intense competition requires intense diplomacy on a range of issues, and in-depth, face-to-face diplomacy is particularly important to managing tensions,” a senior administration official told reporters in a call Friday, previewing Blinken’s trip.

“The Secretary will make clear that the United States intends to responsibly manage our competition with the PRC [People’s Republic of China].” 

The high-level visit follows Biden and Xi committing last year in Woodside, California, to communicate more regularly, between each other and with regular meetings between their senior officials.

A visit by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen earlier this month was lauded by Chinese state media, which brushed over her rebuke of Beijing’s anti-competitive industrial practices in favor of promoting Yellen’s skillful use of chopsticks and Chinese menu choices.

Blinken’s trip likely would not happen unless Xi saw the benefit in promoting photos of a top U.S. official in China.

“China is playing nice with the Biden administration now, which, the Biden administration is also playing nice with China,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, author of the upcoming book, “World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century.”

However, Alperovitch said the good will may not last long.

“China will revert back to its wolf-warrior diplomacy by the summer, when they realize that U.S. direct investment is not back.”

Xi is in a difficult position at home, with an economy still struggling to recover from COVID-19 lockdowns and worsened by the U.S. and other allies diversifying supply chains away from Chinese manufacturing. To avoid U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods — a threat highlighted this week by Biden pushing for new tariffs on Chinese steel — these businesses are relocating operations to southeast Asia or Mexico.

Beijing is fighting back by pouring incentives into manufacturing of green-technology: electric vehicles, solar panels and batteries. The initiative has spurred economic growth but has drawn warnings from the U.S. and Europe about “over-capacity,” harming domestic business by flooding their markets with cheaper goods.

“We have and will continue to emphasize that our concern about overcapacity is not animated by anti-China sentiment or a desire to decouple,” Secretary Yellen said in Beijing last week. “Rather, it is driven by a desire to prevent global economic dislocation and move toward a healthy economic relationship with China.”

But American businesses and other interest groups are not abandoning China yet. Xi received a standing ovation during a dinner with U.S. business leaders when visiting San Francisco in November, and in March he welcomed a delegation of U.S. business and academic heads to Beijing.

“President Xi Jinping emphasized that over the past couple of years, the China-U.S. relationship experienced some setbacks and serious challenges, from which lessons should be learned,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry wrote in a summary of the March meetings.

”The most important understanding he reached with President Biden at last year’s San Francisco meeting was on the need to stabilize and improve China-U.S. relations.”

But Xi is also looking to diversify, in part by deepening ties with Europe. In March, he introduced up to two-weeks visa free travel for Europeans, as well as hosting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the presumptive next secretary-general of NATO, and German Chancellor Olaf Shulz in successive visits.

“I think the Chinese leaders are also aware that this is an election year, there’s only so much that President Biden can do,” said Yawei Liu, senior advisor on China at The Carter Center.

“For China, I think it understands to what extent the US-China relationship can be stabilized, so they’re doing everything they can to hopefully create a gap between the U.S. and its allies…and China is one of the most important markets to Germany,” he added.

“It’s a very complicated relationship, but I think the China side has become more and more realistic, and realistic in the sense that, at least in 2024, the U.S.-China relationship is going to be rocky.”

Blinken, in his visit to Beijing, will bring a host of U.S. grievances.

Top of the list is China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. While Washington has relied on Beijing to try and rein in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons, the administration is increasingly calling out China’s support for Putin’s army.

The administration last week began raising alarm that China’s export to Russia of non-lethal military assistance is becoming a red line for the U.S. — declaring it akin to how China feels about Taiwan.   

“The point we’re trying to make to Chinese interlocutors is that this is our strategic interest, this is the most central issue,” said Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, during a town hall in early April hosted by the National Committee on U.S-China Relations. 

“China is involving themselves in a way that they think we don’t completely understand — we do understand what’s going on,” he added.

“We’ve told China directly, if this continues, it will have an impact on the U.S.-China relationship. We will not sit by and say everything is fine if Russia’s offensives continue and they gain territory in Ukraine.”

And Congress is on a warpath to ban one of China’s popular and profitable exports, TikTok, as part of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) national security supplemental package headed for a vote, likely on Saturday. Biden had earlier said if such legislation reached his desk, he would sign it. The bill also gives TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance the option of selling off the social media company.

Republicans and Democrats share a rare unanimity that China is an all-around threat to America’s security and prosperity.

On Tuesday, bipartisan lawmakers on the House select committee on China unveiled an investigation accusing Beijing of fueling America’s opioid epidemic by incentivizing companies to produce chemicals for the production of fentanyl.

“Congress needs to act alongside President Biden in getting the CCP to take immediate action to stop the fentanyl crisis,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the committee. “The American people are demanding it. There must be accountability.”

Xi committed to Biden in Woodside to step up efforts to address China’s export of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl. Blinken will be joined on his trip by the State Department’s top official on counter narcotics, Assistant Secretary Todd Robinson.

“We’ll underscore why we believe it’s in China’s interest to cooperate in ending the flow of chemical precursors to the United States,” the senior administration official told reporters.

And the U.S. has raised concern over what it criticizes as China’s provocative and destabilizing naval maneuvers in the South and East China Sea – threatening U.S.-treaty allies Japan and the Philippines.

The administration has put a priority focus on restarting military-to-military communications with Beijing to avoid potential conflicts in these waters – channels that were severed in August 2022 when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with China’s defense minister on Tuesday, in the first top-level engagement in nearly two years.

Biden has angered Beijing by promising to defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion, as well as calling Xi a dictator. However, Liu, of the Carter Center, said the Biden administration’s constant reassurances of adhering to the one-China policy – which does not recognize Taiwan as independent – has helped bring Beijing back to the phone and table.

A major meeting between U.S. and Chinese military and naval officials took place on April 5, shortly after the latest phone call between Biden and Xi, their first since the November meeting.

“In China, every time — whether it’s a meeting or a phone call — they always say ‘the U.S. has reaffirmed its one China policy.’ To China, that’s the most important thing,” said Liu.

Campbell, who previously served as Biden’s top official on Asia policy at the National Security Council, said recent developments were promising.

“These are all indications that both sides, I think for now, are determined to keep U.S.-China relations on a steady, stable path,” he said at the town hall. "

[  ................ bv waving to Macca at yesterday's Stones' Rehearsals ]

" The Counter-Revolt Finally Begins."

" Columbia, Yale and NYU camp out while the rest of the U.S. flees from wokeness. "



By : Daniel Henninger

" Before this column ends, we’ll get to the unmissable fact that anti-Israel, often antisemitic, protests are proliferating at what we amusingly choose to call our most “selective” universities—Columbia, Yale, New York University, Stanford, Berkeley. For the moment, add these North Face tent protests on $75,000-a-year campus quads to the sense among the American public that their country is running off the rails.

A list of the phenomena laying us low includes: wokeness, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), defund the police (a depressing subset of wokeness), conspiracy theories, head-in-the-sand isolationism and a self-centered political polarization typified—from left to right—by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.


Ironically this time of year is associated with hope, amid spring and college graduations—except at the University of Southern California, which, fearing trouble, canceled its commencement speakers and told honorary-degree recipients not to show up.

Setting silenced USC aside, a hopeful note one hears at college commencements is that the American system is self-correcting, that despite recurrent stress, it always rights itself. Opinion polls suggest few believe this anymore but—happy spring—it looks as if we may be on the brink of a real counter-revolt against the craziness.

Last week in the hopelessly gridlocked House, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, facing threats to his job from the chaos caucus, cast his lot with the enough-is-enough caucus. The House passed bills to sustain allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Congress isn’t dead—yet.

Blue states and cities that looked willing to collapse rather than defend their citizens have begun to push back against progressives’ pro-criminal and antipolice movements.

At the urging of Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York’s just-passed state budget includes measures to crack down on shoplifting. Assaulting a retail worker will be a felony. Larceny charges can be based on the total goods stolen from different stores. Progressives in the state’s Legislature opposed the measures. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, elected in January on restoring law and order (yes, it can be a Democratic issue), last week announced a plan to support policing in the most crime- and drug-plagued neighborhoods.

March seemed to be a tipping point. The hyperprogressive Council of the District of Columbia, in a city that had become an embarrassing carjacking hellhole, passed an array of anticrime measures. Oregon’s Legislature voted to reverse the state’s catastrophic three-year experiment with drug decriminalization. San Francisco voters approved two measures proposed by, of all people, Mayor London Breed, to ease restrictions on policing and require drug screening for welfare recipients. The results in Los Angeles County’s primary for district attorney strongly suggest progressive George Gascón will be voted out in November.

In all these places, the reversals by elected officials are driven by the prospect of voters’ turning them out of office. That is the U.S. political system trying to right itself.

In California, a safety coalition has collected about 900,000 signatures to reverse parts of Proposition 47, the state’s now-notorious 2014 decision to reduce some theft felonies to misdemeanors. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared sympathetic to overturning a Ninth Circuit decision that bars cities and towns from enforcing vagrancy laws. Though the case emerged from Grants Pass, Ore., which is trying to ban homeless encampments, about three dozen elected officials and organizations in California filed briefs arguing that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling made cleaning up the streets almost impossible.

News stories since the start of the year have noted that many private companies are rethinking policies on DEI, partly under legal pressure, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down the use of race in college admissions.

Some in the corporate DEI movement thought they were immune to restraints. No longer. Companies are rediscovering that the constituency most needing inclusion is their customers. The loudest shot across the bow came last week, when Google fired 28 employees after some staged sit-in protests at its New York and California offices over a contract with Israel’s government. Google’s firing statement describes “completely unacceptable behavior.” No one saw that coming.

All this adds up to a nascent counter-revolt against America’s lurch toward self-destruction. The exception is elite U.S. universities. Their leadership has seen itself as answerable to no one and politically immune.

Robert Kraft, a Columbia grad and owner of the New England Patriots, said this week he will no longer give the school money “until corrective action is taken.”

If big donors ever regain control of these so-called selective schools, a suggestion: Firing the president won’t close the barn door. Instead, fire the admissions office. What a tragedy to think how many serious high-school students were rejected by Columbia, Yale and NYU, edged out by nonuseful idiots whose chosen major is the political structure of re-education camps.

Someone has to be a lagging indicator, and these schools are it."

" This was a magical night in Central Ohio.

                                              Setlist
00:00        1.           Youngstown  (tour debut, first time since 2017)
06:28        2.           Lonesome Day
10:50        3.          Prove It All Night
15:50        4.          No Surrender
20:55        5.          Ghosts
27:25        6.          Letter to You
31:32        7.          The Promised Land
37:25        8.          Spirit in the Night
46:55        9.          Hungry Heart
50:55       10.        Trapped  (Jimmy Cliff cover)
56:10       11.        Streets of Fire  (tour debut, first time since 2016)
1:01:50   12.        I'm Goin' Down  (tour debut, first time since 2017)
1:06:10   13.        Nightshift  (Commodores cover)
1:12:55   14.        Racing in the Street  (sign request)
1:23:30   15.        Last Man Standing  (acoustic, with Barry Danielian on trumpet)
1:30:12   16.        Backstreets
1:39:14   17.        Because the Night  (Patti Smith Group cover)
1:44:30   18.        She's the One
1:49:44   19.        Wrecking Ball
1:56:30   20.        The Rising
2:01:35   21.        Badlands
2:07:36   22.        Thunder Road
      Encore:
2:13:55   23.        Born to Run
2:19:20   24.        Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
2:27:30   25.        Bobby Jean
2:31:50   26.        Dancing in the Dark  (followed by band introductions)
2:37:20   27.        Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
2:45:18   28.        Detroit Medley
2:50:30   29.        Twist and Shout  (The Top Notes cover)
       Encore 2:
2:56:20   30.        I'll See You in My Dreams  (solo acoustic)

       BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN * The Boss
ROY BITTAN- PIANO • KEYBOARDS • ACCORDION
NILS LOFGREN - GUITAR • ACCORDION • MANDOLIN
GARRY TALLENT - BASS
STEVIE VAN ZANDT - GUITAR • VOCALS • MANDOLIN
MAX WEINBERG - DRUMS • PERCUSSION
JAKE CLEMONS - SAXOPHONE
CHARLIE GIORDANO - ORGAN • KEYBOARDS • ACCORDION
SOOZIE TYRELL - VIOLIN • VOCALS • ACOUSTIC GUITAR
      E STREET HORNS AND PERCUSSION
ANTHONY ALMONTE - PERCUSSION • VOCALS
BARRY DANIELIAN - TRUMPET
EDDIE MANION - SAXOPHONE
OZZIE MELENDEZ - TROMBONE
CURT RAMM - TRUMPET
        E STREET CHOIR
ADA DYER - VOCALS
CURTIS KING - VOCALS
LISA LOWELL - VOCALS
MICHELLE MOORE - VOCALS

Note: Patti Scialfa was not present. Rescheduled from September 21, 2023 (and, previously, from March 9, 2023). "I'm Goin' Down", "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", and "Twist and Shout" were not on the printed setlist but were performed; "My City of Ruins" as an alternate to "Racing in the Street", and "Light of Day" were on the printed setlist but were not performed."

" Xi Jinping Has Tough Economic Choices Ahead."

" China is likely to pick security over prosperity. "

" Xi Jinping, the general party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is in a bind. The economy of the People’s Republic of China is facing a once-in-a-generation crisis. The country’s real estate market is in free-fall, its population sank by 2 million people in 2023, and its stock markets have lost roughly $7 trillion since 2021. Numerous countries are cooperating multilaterally to take countermeasures against what they view as the CCP’s military and economic aggression. Xi’s grip on his rule is secure for the moment, but he is confronting unprecedented challenges to his leadership.

Fundamentally, Xi faces a dilemma over China’s future. He and his government must decide whether to continue to prioritize increasing security and centralizing his control over the country, chilling the animal spirits of entrepreneurship in the process, or to loosen his control over the country and reduce aggression toward his neighbors, allowing for greater growth and prosperity. It is highly unlikely that he will choose the latter—and we in the United States must now begin to ready ourselves for potential challenges.

Although the latest official economic statistics show China hitting its growth targets, those figures often reflect CCP narratives more than reality, and other indicators show that China’s economic state is precarious at best. Some outside analysts put China’s actual GDP growth as low as 1.5 percent in 2023. The country has lost at least $4.7 trillion in housing wealth since its market peaked in 2021. Other market indicators offer no hope for a rapid recovery, as the housing sector has just reported its worst performance ever recorded for both new and existing housing sales, while new construction has declined by a record 60 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels. After defaulting on more than $100 billion in international bonds over the past 4 years, China’s largest developers have either collapsed or survive only through government support.

Injections of foreign capital have not helped to close the gap. Foreign direct investment into China is at its lowest point in three decades. China’s stock markets are down by nearly 20 percent over the past year. While stocks are relatively unimportant to Chinese household savings, public wealth is overwhelmingly tied up in real estate. Major players—such as Evergrande, Vanke, and Country Garden—are teetering on the brink of collapse as property prices continue to fall despite the government’s best efforts to prop them up.

The situation could grow far worse as the country approaches a potential deflationary crisis following the largest drop in consumer prices in 15 years. All this comes as the country faces the beginning of its demographic free-fall, during which an aging Chinese population may decline by as much as 100 million people by 2050.

Since the beginning of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening, the CCP has sold China’s economic growth as a key pillar of its legitimacy. Many in the party still recognize the importance of solving these economic challenges to its legitimacy and control. One important way out is foreign direct investment. Some in the CCP are eager to court U.S. capital and reassure U.S. investors that China remains a hospitable market for doing business. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November, Xi dined with U.S. business leaders and emphasized that “China is ready to be a partner and friend of the United States, and there is plenty of room for bilateral cooperation.”

However, despite Xi’s rhetoric, the actions of the Chinese government do not line up with creating a hospitable business environment for U.S. and other foreign companies. China has been steadily tightening its national security and data protection laws at the expense of businesses being able to conduct due diligence, market research, or otherwise normal operations.

Earlier this year, the Chinese government broadened the scope of its state secrets law, making it even more difficult for businesses to provide information for foreign investors and stakeholders. Even more chilling is the detainment of business leaders; in 2023, many top Chinese executives from technology, finance, and real estate companies were detained or went missing. This threat is not limited to Chinese executives, as foreigners have faced exit bans.

The Chinese military’s increasingly aggressive actions in Taiwan also rattle U.S.-based and other foreign businesses. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has steadily increased incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, and in September 2023, there was a record number of PLA aircraft around Taiwanese airspace in one day.

In the event of an invasion of Taiwan, the United States and other Group of Seven countries would likely impose severe economic sanctions, and estimates of the damage to the global economy are in the trillions of dollars. Companies do not want to become caught in the crossfire. Yet Xi seems willing to contemplate taking these risks for his ambition of controlling Taiwan.

Xi now faces a fundamental dilemma in balancing his country’s prosperity and his party’s level of control. Despite the importance of maintaining economic growth for his popular support, Xi has consistently prioritized control ahead of his people’s prosperity.

As Xi wrestles with this choice, we and others—including the Chinese people—must hope for the best while continuing to prepare for the worst. "

" Xi’s Imperial Ambitions Are Rooted in China’s History."

" Myths of peacefulness belie a record as expansionist as any other power. "

By :  Michael Sobolik

" When Richard Nixon defied expectations and went to China in 1972, Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, packed the president’s briefcase. Among Nixon’s reading materials was The Chinese Looking Glass, a book by British journalist Dennis Bloodworth about understanding China on its own terms. In his opening pages, Bloodworth sets the stage by going back to the beginning: “The gaudy catalogue of China’s disasters and dynastic glories, whose monumental scale has given the Chinese much of their character … brings us to our true beginning.”

Kissinger, one of America’s most consequential foreign-policy leaders in recent memory, clearly internalized the centrality of China’s “true beginning.” In his 2011 tome On China, Kissinger marveled at China’s “singularity” and staying power. Indeed, even the hardest of hearts cannot help but be moved by the continuity of a civilization that predates the birth of Christ by hundreds, even thousands, of years.

Awe, however, is no substitute for knowledge. In the opening pages of On China, Kissinger writes of China’s “splendid isolation” that cultivated “a satisfied empire with limited territorial ambition.” The historical record, however, contradicts him. From the Qin dynasty’s founding in 221 B.C. to the Qing’s collapse in 1912 A.D., China’s sovereign territory expanded by a factor of four. What began as a small nation bound in the fertile crescent of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers morphed into an imperial wrecking ball. In the words of Bloodworth, the very author Kissinger recommended to Nixon in 1972, “It would be absurd to pretend that the Chinese had never been greedy for ground—they started life in the valley of the Yellow River and ended by possessing a gigantic empire.”


To be sure, China was not the aggressor in every war it fought. In antiquity, nomadic tribes regularly raided China’s proto-dynasties. During the infamous Opium Wars of the 19th century, Western imperialist powers victimized and preyed upon China at gunpoint. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regularly refers to China’s “Century of Humiliation,” when European empires brutalized China and killed or wounded tens of thousands of Chinese men, women, and children. Indeed, the party has memorialized these grievances in a permanent exhibit of the National Museum of China, just steps away from Tiananmen Square.

For all of Beijing’s legitimate and long-standing security concerns, however, the sheer scope of China’s expansion is undeniable. Western leaders often deny or ignore it, usually at the behest and prodding of Chinese leaders. When Nixon finally gained an audience with Mao Zedong, he reassured the chairman, “We know China doesn’t threaten the territory of the United States.” Mao quickly corrected him: “Neither do we threaten Japan or South Korea.” To which Nixon added, “Nor any country.” Within the decade, Beijing invaded Vietnam.

At the time, Nixon’s gambit was to split the Soviet bloc and drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nixon and Kissinger saw the Sino-Soviet split and took stock of the PRC’s trajectory: a growing population that, once harnessed, was poised to dominate the global economy. It was textbook realpolitik: cold, dispassionate tactics divorced from moralism. If Washington could turn the Soviet Union’s junior partner, the West could significantly hamper Moscow’s ability to project power into Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

During the final years of Nixon’s life, his presidential speechwriter William Safire asked him about that fateful trip to Beijing in 1972. Had opening up to the PRC made Americans safer and China freer? According to Safire, “That old realist, who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: ‘We may have created a Frankenstein.’” Over time, many in the United States have come to realize this predicament. Unfortunately, articulating that problem well has proved difficult.

During her brief stint as director of policy planning at the State Department in 2019, Kiron Skinner previewed the shop’s keystone intellectual project: a strategy to counter China, in the spirit of George Kennan’s “containment” strategy. At a public event in April 2019, Skinner tipped her hand and revealed her philosophy of U.S.-China competition: “This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before.” She went on to add, incorrectly: “It’s the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian.” Skinner received widespread criticism for these remarks and was soon after dismissed for unrelated issues.

Skinner’s mistake was twofold. First, she simply got the history wrong and ignored imperial Japan in World War II. Of deeper consequence was her failure to explain what strategic culture actually is, why it matters, and how China’s past shapes the CCP’s behavior today. In fairness, these errors aren’t unique to Skinner. Understanding Chinese history can be difficult for most Westerners. In some ways, it’s difficult to think of two more different nations. The United States is less than three hundred years old.

China was unified more than two hundred years before Christ was born. Immigrants founded America. Denizens established China. The United States was born out of revolution against a colonial power. China came into being from a regional conflict of gigantic proportions. Favorable geography allowed America to grow economically and territorially on its own terms and at its own pace. China came into being surrounded by rival kingdoms and tribes on every side.

Americans turn to one source more than any other to make sense of these differences: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. One of his more recognizable dictums, “All warfare is based on deception,” has captured the imagination of many Western thinkers. Instead of investigating the history that informed Sun Tzu’s counsel, however, many policymakers take the easier path of Orientalizing China. “China thinks in centuries, and America thinks in decades” is a well-worn trope. Another well-meaning but vapid cliché is, “America plays chess, but China plays Go.”

These statements are often left untethered from history and offered as self-evident axioms. What’s left are useless clichés that offer no actual understanding of why Chinese strategists advised cunning and deception, or how China’s unique historical experiences informed military tactics. In the absence of curiosity, an impression easily forms of China as “the other,” a mysterious, inscrutable competitor. A shallow understanding of Beijing’s past leads to incomplete conclusions about its present behavior.

More often than not, policymakers find it easier to avoid China’s history entirely. In late 2020, the policy planning office finished the 72-page report. It was a commendable attempt to reprise Kennan’s strategic clarity, but China’s dynastic strategic culture received a single page of attention.

Reducing strategic culture to vague racial differences helps no one except Chinese President Xi Jinping and his party henchmen. The CCP works to enmesh itself with the Chinese people and regularly uses them as a rhetorical human shield. To criticize the CCP, according to the well-worn rhetorical trope of Beijing’s diplomats, is to “hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion people.” As a matter of course, Beijing uses this specious logic to construe anti-CCP policies as evidence of racism. Years before former U.S. President Donald Trump fell headlong into this trap with his careless rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung-flu,” a young generation of China hawks had vowed to evade this pitfall.

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote about this resolve in his 2021 bestseller, Chaos Under Heaven, which documented the collective decision of Washington, D.C.-based China hands to blunt Beijing’s attempts “to divide Americans by party or ethnicity, to divert attention from its actions.” I was a regular member of those meetings and still believe America’s leaders must differentiate the party from the Chinese people—not only out of respect for those who daily live under the CCP’s jackboot, but also for the safety of Chinese Americans, who faced a rise of race-based crime in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, in doing so, America must avoid a separate trap: equating the party with China.

China’s history did not begin in 1949 when Mao and the CCP established the PRC. Nor did it start with China’s “Century of Humiliation,” when European imperialist powers forcibly opened China in the mid-19th century. Chinese civilization predates America and the West by orders of millennia. That context gives meaning to the party’s contemporary behavior. The themes of greatness, fall, and restoration hidden in Xi’s remarks in 2013 constitute the essence of Chinese history.

They are the four-act play of China’s story, or “strategic culture”—without which it is impossible to understand the CCP’s strategy today. Strategic culture explains how a country’s unique experiences shape distinct national identities that translate into foreign policy. These three elements—story, identity, and policy—reinforce and shape one another. To be sure, the CCP has its own story, identity, and policies, but the party is one tributary in a long river. American leaders cannot prevail against the CCP without understanding the story and identity that belong to China.

From the start, China has been a civilizational juggernaut striving for political hegemony. China has often attempted to conceal this ambition with conciliatory diplomacy, but its neighbors know from experience the struggle to live—and survive—in the dragon’s shadow. CCP diplomats often bully China’s neighbors by claiming sovereignty over part or all of their territory “from time immemorial”—an inadvertent admission that the party is the latest crusader in a long line of imperialists. This struggle that was once relegated to the nations of East Asia is now a challenge for every country in the world.

Beijing is approaching the world not to embrace it, but to rule it. The Western world has no excuse for missing this reality, and American politicians have badly misjudged Beijing for decades. Washington’s China policy will continue to be a “two steps forward, one step back” affair until it reckons with the Middle Kingdom’s penchant for imperialism.

This reality calls into question the unspoken objective of American policymakers: seeking a democratic China. For all their differences, both hawks and doves in the United States have framed the “China problem” as an ideological challenge. Proponents of engagement believed that economic contacts would necessarily lead to political reform, a belief rooted in liberal internationalism. Advocates of confrontation couch the CCP regime as the problem, which implies an ideological solution.

The one unchanging constant in America’s China policy since Nixon’s meeting with Mao in 1972 is the steady commitment to regime change, either by commerce or competition. The underlying belief in the universal power of democracy has proved intoxicating. “If we can just make them like us,” the thinking goes, “we can turn an enemy into a friend.”

Perhaps this self-delusion is inevitable. America’s national identity is steeped in beliefs about liberty, equality, and opportunity. But the CCP’s heritage raises an uncomfortable question for the United States: Even if modern China were to become a democracy, would it cease to be the Middle Kingdom?

If the CCP collapsed and China followed Taiwan’s path of economic and political liberalization, would it suddenly lose its appetite for hegemony? Maybe. Then again, perhaps simplifying Beijing’s behavior to its current Communist Party overlords ignores thousands of years of China’s own history, as well as the strategic culture that informs those decisions."

" The Cookie-Cutter Campus Protests."

" Columbia’s Gaza encampment invaded Hamilton Hall this week via Instagram. "



By : Daniel Henninger

May 1, 2024 5:28 pm ET

" There must be something in the gene pool of the hard political left in this country. Eventually, the violence arrives.

On Saturday, Columbia University administrators wrote in an email that they wouldn’t call in the New York City Police Department to avoid “further inflaming” what was happening on their besieged campus. Columbia President Minouche Shafik, they said, was “focused on de-escalating the rancor on Columbia’s campus.” Naturally, the unrestrained left escalated.

Early Tuesday morning, pro-Palestinian activists wearing masks and all-black antifa-like clothing broke into and took over Hamilton Hall, believe it or not home to Columbia’s still-extant Classics Department. The militants set up barricades, smashed windows, everything we’ve come to expect.

At 9 o’clock that evening, the NYPD arrived in massive numbers, entered Hamilton through a second-floor window, arrested the “students,” and put them on police buses. With luck, they’ll actually be prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and expelled from Columbia. These cops were once called New York’s Finest, and this was one of their finest hours.

So it really is 1968 all over again or, more relevant, 2020 and the George Floyd protests. The Floyd protests spread almost instantaneously to hundreds of U.S. cities, just as the so-called Gaza solidarity encampments sprouted on many campuses. It isn’t spontaneous. This is modern protest as produced by the cookie cutter of social media.

At 1 a.m. Tuesday, a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted on Instagram a call for an “urgent mobilization” at Hamilton Hall. Earlier, the group said: “We will not move until Columbia meets our demands or we are moved by force.” This was effectively a mini-Hamas strategy—give the authorities no choice but to come after you. It’s the most basic flip-the-script tactic: The perpetrators of mayhem transform themselves into camera-ready victims of “state violence.”

Anarchy like this is an opportunity for the U.S.’s enemies, and one hopes the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have this Palestine-justice activity on its radar. Why wait for another domestic act of terror to happen?

The encampments’ defenders will say that is an overreaction, that despite the violence at Columbia and UCLA, their protests are only about conditions in Gaza. The fact remains that Gaza is inseparable from Hamas and Iran, two entities in a network dedicated to attacking the U.S. Add to that the revived terrorism units of Islamic State. All of a sudden, we have pro-Palestinian encampments spread across a country with a porous, overwhelmed southern border. Not to worry?

It is worth addressing the notion that most of the student protesters are peaceful kids moved only by concern for the Gazans. For some, possibly so. Still, we live in an age in which media drives everything, and it is difficult not to see how adeptly the media has been manipulated to shape public impressions of the encampments.

Almost every time a pro-Gaza student gets access to a media microphone, one hears a bland commitment to nothing more than easing the suffering of Palestinian women and children. It sounds rote, almost scripted. What seems to be going on here is a conscious strategy to establish an equivalence of sincerity—a facade of empathy is always mandatory now—between the pro-Palestinian students and the Jewish students resisting antisemitism on these campuses.

The protesters know that their highly theatrical encampments will generate interviews. If they can repeat earnest declarations of humanitarian concern often enough, an equivalence of sincerity between them and Jewish students will come to dominate the media narrative. That equivalence in turn achieves another goal: suppressing the historical context of these campus protests.

The impossible mission of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is defined by the names of history: Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama; Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinians’ interests for decades were represented by the ever-unreliable PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and now the 88-year-old, near-irrelevant Mahmoud Abbas. The list of negotiated-and-violated agreements is long: Oslo, Gaza-Jericho, Wye, Sharm El-Sheikh, Camp David, Annapolis.

The students’ naiveté and willful “river to the sea” ignorance about the realities of the Middle East peace process is the benign explanation. More cynical is what has emerged the past week as the activists’ primary interest: forcing university endowments to divest from Israeli companies.

This has little to do with the aftermath of Oct. 7. The anti-Israel BDS movement—boycott, divestment, sanctions—emerged around 2005. Its most pernicious tactic was to ban Israeli scholars from conferences at U.S. universities and elsewhere. When people say antisemitism has been building in universities for years, this is what they are talking about. BDS made Israelis shunned, second-class citizens of the academic community.

Then there’s Joe Biden. Because his re-election team assumes an equivalence between younger Democratic voters and the Gaza encampment occupants, the American president has himself become a hostage to the hardest of the U.S. hard left. He won’t cross them, and they know it.

When Mr. Biden gets to Chicago in August for the Democratic convention, uber-left Mayor Brandon Johnson won’t have the cops’ back the way New York’s Eric Adams did this week. On current course, the Biden candidacy could die this summer in Chicago."