Miscellaneous News

Bellum_Romanum said:

Here's the entirety of Prof.Ferguson's Lord of the Rings Analogy vis-a-vis America/west (Numenor, Elves, middle-earth) vs. China, Russia, Iran, (Sauron, Saruman, Orcs)

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Sardaukar20 said:

Well. There goes Blinken's 10 minute appointment with Xi Jinping. Even his meeting with Wang Yi might turn into a lecture by Wang Yi. If only Blinken could just keep his stupid mouth shut just for awhile.

If Blinken continues to talk stupid, he might not even get a courtesy state banquet like Yellen. He might have to get Nicolas Burns to take him to the nearest Mc Donald's and Starbucks in Beijing to get food and drinks.

If he continues to make noise about the "Uighur Genocide", then China might as well divert his flight to land on Urumqi. Have the mayor of Urumqi "welcome" him and show him around. Or maybe not, just leave him to wait on the tarmac indefinitely.

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Feima said:

Speaking of Jin Yong, here's an analysis of his novels that I saw years ago. His first novel, Book and Sword, set in the time of Qing emperor Qianlong, took the "China is Han" position and depicted the Manchus as foreign invaders to be expelled. His final novel, Duke of Mount Deer, written 15 years later, set in the time of Qing emperor Kangxi (grandfather of Qianlong), signaled a turnaround in his thinking. In this novel, the protagonist Wei Xiaobao served Kangxi as a high official while concurrently a senior member in the Heaven and Earth secret society working to overthrow Qing rule. He was loyal to both sides, and spent much of his time preventing one side from dealing too much damage to the other. Two interesting parts to the ending:

- A bunch of famous scholars tried to persuade Wei to overthrow Kangxi and return China to Han rule. Wei (or one of his educated wives) countered that late Ming was corrupt, oppressive and full of strife, whereas Kangxi (now generally recognized as one of China's greatest emperors) kept peace and prosperity for the common people. The civil war required to overthrow Kangxi and its aftermath would be disastrous.

- Wei was the son of a prostitute and never knew who his father was. And the book's end, he asked his mother about his father. She replied that she was very popular in those days and his father could've been Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan or Hui*. Wei asked, not one of those foreign red hair devils right? His mum replied, of course not, if any red hair devil came looking for me, I'd kick him out.



* This refers to late Qing / early ROC's 五族共和 concept, where Chinese people were grouped into five: Han, Manchus, Mongols, Hui and Tibetan. This part says that Wei was a *Chinese*, not one of its specific constituent groups. So it was ok that he served both the Manchu emperor and the Heaven and Earth "Manchus are invaders" sect.

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Bellum_Romanum said:

PART III

In a way, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris personify the post-Vietnam Democratic Party’s approach, which ran from Jimmy Carter through Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. This approach nearly always prioritizes “de-escalation” over deterrence (even in Ukraine that has been true), and tends to cut the defense budget. By contrast, Donald Trump has veered between belligerence and isolationism, clearly preferring trade wars to the “fire and fury” of real wars. But he is temperamentally good at deterrence — if only because our adversaries find him so unpredictable. Under Trump defense spending went up.

By launching their drone and missile swarm at Israel, the Iranians have unwittingly given many Republicans permission to follow Pompeo down a path of hawkishness that is anything but isolationist. Read the new Foreign Affairs essay by outgoing Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher and former Trump adviser Matt Pottinger to get a flavor. “China,” they argue, “is underwriting expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.” Stopping it will require “will require greater friction in US-Chinese relations” and “rapidly increasing US defense capabilities.” They accept my longstanding argument that we are in Cold War II, but dismiss détente as likely only to “fortify [the Chinese] conviction that they can destabilize the world with impunity.” In short, Pottinger and Gallagher want to fast-forward this new cold war to the 1980s.

Will Trump himself heed the hawks’ advice? If he chooses to stick with isolationism, I suspect it may hurt his chances of reelection. But if he discards that delusion, there could suddenly be a 1980 vibe to his year — and not only because Trump has rediscovered Ronald Reagan’s lethal question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Despite having pursued a policy of technological containment of China that has been in many ways tougher and more effective than Trump’s, Biden looks weak right now. Not only has he been lousy at deterring America’s foes. He can’t even get a close US ally — Israel — to do as he asks.

It may therefore be that the ultimate historical significance of the Iranian attack on Israel will be its effect not on the Middle East but on Republican sentiment in the US.

Tolkien’s hobbits are also isolationists, in their way. However, despite their strong preference for the quiet life, Frodo and Sam come to realize that they must fight their way to Mordor and risk their necks to destroy Sauron’s Ring of Power. When they return to the Shire, they find that it, too, has been overrun by the Enemy. But it is not too late to salvage the situation. Symbolically, the wicked wizard Saruman perishes on the very threshold of Frodo’s beloved home:

“And that’s the end of that,” said Sam. “A nasty end, and I wish I needn’t have seen it; but it’s a good riddance.”

“And the very last end of the War, I hope,” said Merry.

“I hope so,” said Frodo and sighed. “The very last stroke. But to think that it should fall here, at the very door of Bag End! Among all my hopes and fears at least I never expected that.”

“I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess,” said Sam gloomily. “And that’ll take a lot of time and work.”

Words for isolationists to ponder in 2024.


Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

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Bellum_Romanum said:

Here's the entirety of Prof.Ferguson's Lord of the Rings Analogy vis-a-vis America/west (Numenor, Elves, middle-earth) vs. China, Russia, Iran, (Sauron, Saruman, Orcs)

PART I

The Second Cold War Is Escalating Faster Than the First To understand what is at stake in the fight against the axis of China, Russia and Iran, just read “The Lord of the Rings.”


In J.R.R. Tolkien’s great epic, The Lord of the Rings, it becomes apparent only gradually that the forces of darkness have united. Sauron, with his baleful all-seeing eye, emerges as the leader of a vast axis of evil: the Black Riders, the corrupted wizard Saruman, the subhuman orcs, the malignant courtier Wormtongue, the giant venomous spider Shelob — they are all in it together, and Mordor is their headquarters.

Tolkien knew whereof he wrote. A veteran of World War I, he watched with dismay the approach of a second great conflagration. Sipping pints of bitter and puffing his pipe in “The Shire” — his idealized Middle England — he could only shudder as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperialist Japan came together to form their Axis in 1936-37, and mutter, “I told you so,” when Hitler and Stalin joined forces in 1939.

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We, too, are witnessing the formation and consolidation of an Axis. I was vividly reminded of Tolkien by a tweet published by the conservative broadcaster Mark R. Levin on Tuesday. It is worth quoting: “Appeasement is escalation. Our enemies are on the move. Our allies are being encircled and attacked or soon attacked. … Conservatism and MAGA are not about isolationism or pacifism. They’re not about appeasement or national suicide. … It is up to us, patriotic Americans, to step into the breach and get this done now.”

The significance of Levin’s intervention — penned from Israel, which he has been visiting — is that it so clearly puts him on a collision course with the isolationist elements within the Republican Party, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who last week threatened to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson if he pressed ahead with a bill that would restore US aid to Ukraine. “We are going to stand for freedom and make sure that Vladimir Putin doesn’t march through Europe,” Johnson declared. “We have to project to Putin, Xi, and Iran, and North Korea, and anybody else that we will defend freedom.”

To the likes of Greene and Levin’s former Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson, the war in Ukraine is just “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing,” as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously said of Czechoslovakia in September 1938. They appear quite unembarrassed to serve as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “useful idiots,” in direct lineal succession to Hitler’s and Stalin’s apologists in the 1930s.

And not only Putin’s. For, as State Department spokesman Matthew Miller pointed out last week, behind the Russian war effort stands the vast economic resources of the People’s Republic of China. “What we have seen over the past months is that there have been materials moving from China to Russia that Russia has used to rebuild [its] industrial base and produce arms that are showing up on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Miller told reporters on Tuesday. “And we are incredibly concerned about that.” In Beijing earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned her Chinese counterpart that there would be “significant consequences” if China continued to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

Despite their protestations that they wish to act as peacemakers, China’s leaders gave the invasion of Ukraine their blessing on its eve — what else did the mutual pledge of a “no-limits” partnership mean? — and President Xi Jinping’s support has been crucial to Putin’s survival ever since his invasion force was repelled from the outskirts of Kyiv two years ago.

By the same token, one cannot treat Iran’s war against Israel in isolation. Tehran supports Russia’s war against Ukraine, supplying thousands of drones and missiles similar to the ones unleashed against Israel last weekend. Russia, in turn, is likely helping to strengthen Iran’s air defenses. China is not only one of the main buyers of Iran’s oil; Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Tehran immediately after the attack on Israel to praise rather than condemn his Iranian counterparts. Chinese propaganda has been consistently anti-Israel since Hamas’s murderous attacks of Oct. 7 last year.

The emergence of this new Axis was foreseen by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, as long ago as 1997. In his book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski wrote:

Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower.

Brzezinski was prophetic. Looking back over the past three years, however, it is hard not to conclude that his successors in the Biden administration have done a great deal unwittingly as well as wittingly to make this coalition a reality, beginning by abandoning the Afghans to the tender mercies of the Taliban in 2021, then failing to deter Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022, and finally failing to deter Iran from unleashing its proxies against Israel in 2023. Yes, Biden stepped up to aid Ukraine and Israel when they came under attack, but an earlier show of strength might have avoided both emergencies.

Levin and Johnson have realized, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long argued, that some quarrels in far-away countries must ultimately concern us. They are parts of a single war being waged by a new Axis against the fundamental values we hold dear: democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom. I predict that the isolationists’ counterarguments will not age well.

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coolgod said:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1782302172207841501

Blinken

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tamsen_ikard said:

It doesn't make sense to me why SCMP is so anti-China when its owned by Alibaba. Plus after nat sec law, there should have been a change in its journalist and editor composition. So how come its so anti-China?

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horse said:

That is what I have been saying all along.

They get their strategies straight out of the comic books.

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