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À partir d’avant-hierThe American Conservative

Polish Conservatives Under Siege

Foreign Affairs

Polish Conservatives Under Siege

The former ruling party is having difficulty navigating parliamentary isolation as cultural revolution comes to Poland.

Krakow,,Poland,-,February,9,,2024:,National,Farmer's,Strike.,Ogólnopolski

Poland is not a country in which left-liberal policies should go unchallenged. Among Europe’s large nations, it is arguably the most religious and conservative. A defiant independence has long emanated from Warsaw. Politicians from both American parties have sought favor there. EU devotees, too, have jockeyed for hearts and minds along the Vistula. 

Nonetheless, a period of weakness on the right is giving the country’s new government carte blanche to reshape society according to Western establishment dogma. Transgender soldiers, abortion on demand, and so-called hate-speech laws are firmly on the agenda less than three months into the new government’s tenure. No domestic political solution figures to materialize in the short term. Polish Catholics, traditionalists, and globalism skeptics are in for a bumpy ride.

This political disequilibrium is undoubtedly one of the reasons Poland has become a flash point in Europe’s recent wave of farmer protests. Last Tuesday, an estimated 10,000 farmers marched on Warsaw to demand concessions from the government. Their two central grievances are the burdensome agricultural stipulations of the “European Green Deal” initiatives and the unchecked flow of agricultural products from neighboring Ukraine. The latter policy, implemented in the EU after Russia’s invasion two years ago, has lowered the prices Polish farmers can command and consigned them to a cost disadvantage, as Ukrainian products are not subject to EU quality regulations. Farmers have blocked border crossings and critical roadways in response to a perceived lack of government action. In some cases, they have dumped Ukrainian grain shipments. 

Both issues should be understood in a Polish context. The European climate-policy debate tends to pit the comparatively poor East and South of the continent against the Northwest. The former sense policy action favorable to the Old Europe, particularly Germany. An average Polish worker, still earning far less than a German peer, might cite hubris for Germany’s likely recession, which is widely perceived to be self-inflicted in the name of climate purity. Indeed, protesters have blocked key roadways to Germany, in addition to those at the Ukrainian border. 

The dispute over agricultural imports is uniquely Polish. Poland has arguably shouldered a heavier economic and humanitarian burden from the war than any country outside the United States and Ukraine itself. Its uncompromising stance toward Russia strained regional alliances, and it cultivated unusual political friendships between the former right-wing government and its counterparts in Washington and Berlin, at least before the election campaign began in earnest. Ukrainians have enjoyed favorable housing loans and child-tax credits. None of this has been particularly controversial. While last year’s election campaign was bitter, the opposing camps held largely the same stance on Ukraine policy. After two years, heavily strained sectors like agriculture are finally reaching their breaking point.

Public opinion also should be understood in a Polish context. Foreign outlets like Deutsche Welle and the Wall Street Journal have claimed ubiquitous “far-right” elements and Russian propagandists are orchestrating the protests, but 78 percent of otherwise-divided Poles support the farmers. Nonetheless, protest leaders admitted Tuesday’s talks with government figures “did not yield any specifics.” The next protest is scheduled for March 6.

The farmers might have elicited more sympathy from the previous government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which effectively wielded single-party rule from 2015-23.  PiS consolidated power on the right and made Poland a stalwart of European conservatism, but it grew complacent, abrasive, and repellent to potential allies in recent years. In an environment of long-term economic growth and popular government policies toward Ukraine, the election nonetheless proved a referendum on the political persona of PiS. In October, PiS won the highest vote total with 35.4 percent, enough for its third straight top finish, but no coalition partner could be found. In bordering Slovakia, which held elections the previous month, a mere 22.9 percent was enough for the controversial Robert Fico to form a government and embark on a fourth term. PiS, by contrast, had become a pariah.

The new government has wasted no time in trampling on Polish society and culture. After feigning hesitation, the nominally centrist Third Way coalition confirmed it would get in line on pro-abortion legislation; it was a mandatory stance in second-time Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition. The newly created Minister of Equality is working with the Ministry of Justice to craft a “hate-speech” bill. The Ministry of National Defense announced, “[W]e take seriously the problem of difficult access to military service for transsexual and intersex people and are analyzing the possibility of changing the provisions in this area.” Marshal of the Sejm (akin to Speaker of the House) Szymon Hołownia posed for a photo in parliament with a group of illegal migrants and NGO activists just days after taking office. An education reform abolished homework under age 15 and stripped major elements of Polish history and literature and the Catholic faith from the curriculum; a concurrent teacher-pay increase tempered resistance. (Ironically, this article is a result of countless hours of Polish-language homework. Perhaps that is the point.) 

After employing continual “rule of law” rhetoric during the campaign, the new government has raided the public television headquarters and seized political prisoners in the Presidential Palace. Sympathetic Western media have provided air cover for these gangster tactics. President of the European Commission and Tusk ally Ursula von der Leyen hasn’t pretended the EU’s freezing of funds to Poland, totaling €137 billion, was about anything other than politics. 

Damningly, PiS hasn’t converted this string of atrocities into political capital. In fact, some recent polls have suggested the party no longer garners the largest share of voter support, a development that never occurred during last year’s campaign. It all cries out for reform.

PiS has replaced key leadership figures with politicians wielding more influence in Brussels. It has selected 36-year-old rising star Tobiasz Bocheński as its mayoral candidate in liberal Warsaw, where a respectable showing might portend a presidential candidacy in 2025. Yet a retirement announcement from the polarizing PiS boss and former Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński is the one personnel change that might move the needle, and it does not appear forthcoming. Unseated Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, whose political shortcomings grew apparent in last year’s campaign, also remains in the upper echelons of party power. 

The party appears uncertain how to navigate its newfound parliamentary isolation, combined with a leftist media environment and openly hostile governments in key Western capitals. Polish conservatives increasingly place their hopes in the veto power of President Andrzej Duda and the prospect of a second Trump administration in the United States. The Polish right has never been weaker in recent memory.

Deprived of a political outlet, Polish conservatives are forced to vent frustrations through channels like the recent farmer protests. Keep an eye on November’s Independence March, an annual manifestation of the political right that Tusk has sought to suppress. By that time, Poles might well have had enough of this runaway government train. They should also know the results of the previous week’s U.S. elections. It figures to be an important week in Polish politics. But will it be a productive one?

The post Polish Conservatives Under Siege appeared first on The American Conservative.

Taiwan’s Time for Choosing

Foreign Affairs

Taiwan’s Time for Choosing

Saturday’s elections could be a watershed for Taipei—and American policy in the Indo-Pacific.

Tamsui,,New,Taipei,City,/,Taiwan,-,January,4,2020:

The lessons of the 2016 and 2020 Taiwan presidential elections were easily parsed: In the former, Taiwanese voters rejected closer cooperation with the People’s Republic of China and sought to assert a distinct democratic Taiwanese identity. In the latter, frustration with the domestic policies of the incumbent progressive (but pro-independence) party was no match for the voters’ anxieties over the PRC, which was then poised to crack down on the democratic movement in Hong Kong. 

If current trends hold for the 2024 election, set for this Saturday, summarizing the lesson won’t be so easy. It appears the median Taiwanese voter is still more likely to support the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party than the center-right, pro-cooperation Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), but the margins this year will be narrow. The DPP nominee and incumbent Vice President Lai Ching-te has consistently held a narrow margin over both the KMT nominee, New Taipei City’s Mayor Hou Yu-ih, and the third-party candidate Ko Wen-je. While incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen achieved staggering victories in both 2016 and 2020, her vice-president has not succeeded in running up the score in the same way, nor is it clear that the DPP will be able to hold its majority in the legislature. 

Tsai has won her share of plaudits on the international stage, with everyone from Ted Cruz to Nancy Pelosi lauding her as a courageous bulwark against the PRC’s ambitions for cross-strait unity—with or without Taiwan’s consent. Domestically, however, views of her leadership are not so glowing—her party suffered blowout losses in the 2022 local elections, where national security issues are deprioritized, and this year her ratings plummeted, with public approval of her performance polling at consistently under 40%. The immediate cause of this drop appears to stem from a wave of sexual harassment allegations within the DPP under her leadership—including some against a close aide of Tsai’s—but the local election results from 2022 suggest a deeper fatigue with the progressive party’s leadership. 

The KMT, however, has not demonstrated the ability to capitalize on this decline. Their nominee, Hou, was identified ahead of the primary as the best the party likely had to offer in a general election—not a firebrand like their 2020 nominee Han Kuo-yu, and not interested in cooperation with the PRC to the off-putting degree of the party’s last president, Ma Ying-jeou (2008–16). Indeed, there has been an ongoing shift within the KMT’s ranks regarding the PRC: During his presidency, Ma struck a major trade deal with Beijing in 2010 and de-prioritized military spending, and he continues to play up his Chinese heritage in his post-presidency. Han, in the last race, visited China and touted the benefits of economic cooperation, even as he tried desperately to keep the PRC leadership and its calls for a “one-country, two-systems” model (a la Hong Kong) at arm’s length.

Hou’s approach has been distinct from both of those men, reflecting growing skepticism within the KMT of the benefits of PRC cooperation, especially among younger members, as well as the overall population’s increasing view of themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Hou’s approach to the PRC has therefore been to claim his election is necessary to preserve peace across the Strait. On the surface there may be a logic to that argument: Hou has vowed that he will continue the DPP’s work on deterring an invasion from the PRC and maintaining their political system, but claimed that unlike with Tsai’s administration Beijing will be willing to enter negotiations with him. The message from Hou—and his party compatriots—has been stark: A vote for the KMT is a vote for peace, while a vote for the DPP is a vote for war

The problem with that approach is two-fold: First, voters do not seem to believe it, or to trust the KMT in general on issues of cross-Strait security. Second, as the DPP have consistently countered, it is the PRC that has raised tensions across the Strait with their incendiary rhetoric, military exercises, and frequent incursions into Taiwan’s airspace and waters. There is a deeper point to the DPP’s contention: Beijing has been harshly critical of Taipei’s military buildup and how it has sought support from the U.S. to achieve it. It is therefore conceivable that Beijing might not be interested in dialogue with Hou if he does not slow defense spending and halt cooperation with Washington. 

The third-party candidate, the former Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je has consistently polled in third place, but not far from the KMT candidate’s numbers. Ko, who has primarily campaigned on the need to challenge the two major entrenched parties, has proven unable to overcome the KMT and DPP’s leads for several reasons, among them his penchant for gaffes and his choice of a U.S.-educated running mate with poor Chinese language skills. In an odd incident in November when his Taiwan People’s Party and the KMT announced that they would field a unity candidate, only for talks to break down when neither Ko nor Hou would step aside for the other. It was perhaps a fool’s errand to believe the KMT would yield to a third-party candidate polling below them, or that Ko would compromise his outsider status, but the episode constituted an embarrassment for both sides. Ko’s ultimate contribution to the race seems as if it will be keeping the eventual winner far from the 50 percent mark and its attendant mandate.

Through it all, China has not been a passive onlooker. After Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou—defeated by Hou for the KMT nomination in spring 2023—announced that he would seek an independent presidential bid, a series of investigations were launched by Chinese provincial authorities against Foxconn, seemingly warning him not to split the vote further. If so, Gou got the message, ending his campaign within weeks. Other steps taken by Beijing include stepped up import duties on Taiwanese products, increased incursions into their airspace and territorial waters, and a sustained campaign of disinformation regarding the economic consequences of a DPP victory. 

Since 2016, however, PRC sticks have proven consistently ineffective at influencing the Taiwanese public to do what Beijing wants, and there’s little reason to believe that will change now. If the Taiwanese public is going to turn on the DPP, it will likely be for reasons all their own. 

While that may not happen this month, the DPP’s eroding popularity and Lai’s weak mandate suggest that it inevitably will. An evolving KMT’s rule and its consequences for Taiwan’s security and relationship with both the U.S. and PRC must be grappled with—by a PRC that has not come to terms with how distrusted it is on the island, by a U.S. that prefers a Taiwan that restrains the PRC’s regional ambitions, and by the KMT itself, which seemingly has not made up its mind as to what its cross-Strait policy is. 

The time for deciding may not be long in coming.  

The post Taiwan’s Time for Choosing appeared first on The American Conservative.

China’s Biological Clock

Foreign Affairs

China’s Biological Clock

Xi Jinping’s three-child policy is proving to be too little, too late.

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China wants to turn back its biological clock. The Communist Party’s one-child policy, a program which began before I was born and was phased out just two U.S. presidential election cycles ago, has since been replaced with a three-child policy to combat dangerously low birth rates and an aging population. In the years since it introduced the new objective, the CCP has used a variety of tactics—from financial incentives and party lectures on “family values” to phone calls from CCP officials—to attempt to convince women to become wives, wives to become mothers, and mothers of one to become mothers of two or three. 

Chinese women are getting fed up with it, apparently. They are too busy with their careers and caring for elderly relatives, some told the Wall Street Journal this week, and the government’s cash incentives for having a baby are too small to outweigh a salaried job. 

“Having had one child, I think I’ve done my duty,” one woman, Feng Chenchen, told the Journal. Feng said she would consider having a second child for 300,000 yuan, the equivalent of $41,000. That’s a good bit more than the $80 to $500 per month Chinese women have been offered by the party to procreate. 

In other words, all the ham-fisted policies of a totalitarian regime are failing in the face of an economic crisis, and a feminist milieu, caused in no small part by the one-child policy. So far, the new measures have had the opposite of their intended effect: With the exception of a brief increase in 2016, China’s total birth rate has steadily fallen since the end of the one-child policy. It shrunk by more than 40 percent in the last five years. That low birthrate took the pro-natalist question beyond mere talk of labor markets when, for the first time since the Great Famine of 1960-61, the Chinese population hit a net loss in 2022. Early numbers for 2023, which have since been deleted by the CCP, depict an even greater drop in the past year. 

These birth rates alone are less interesting than their causes, which include low marriage rates, high divorce rates, and a large, aging population that now disproportionately burdens the numeric few in the younger generations. It’s a story that sounds all too familiar in the United States, where total fertility hit a record low in 2020 and has yet to substantially recover. Like the United States, too, China’s low marriage rates are primarily driven by women. A 2021 survey of 3,000 Chinese aged 18 to 26 years found more than 40 percent of women in urban areas did not plan to marry, while only 25 percent of men in urban areas held the same.

There are obvious errors in China’s approach, such as kitschy messaging and clumsy policy mechanisms. The whiplash alone is absurd: We did not need to see it happening in China to guess that a turn from mandatory abortions to mandatory pregnancy would make a feminist out of too many women, who have been made to feel that their fertility is merely a pawn in a global game of chess. Still, the CCP’s urgency, while misguided, is clearly not misplaced.

The real cause of China’s demographic failure is not that the party has attempted to use the power of the state to shape the culture, albeit poorly. The problem is that such changes take generations to effect, and were started too late. This is a good lesson for Americans, who have contented themselves that low birth rates either don’t matter or that they may be fixed in the four years their party is in power: Demography is a long, long game. When it comes to birth rates, China is about to learn whether there is a point of no return.

We would be wise to remember this when it comes to our own national fertility crisis which, though less dire than that of China, is only a generation or two behind. The conservative tendency is to center the fertility discourse on whether state power ought to play a significant role in addressing the problem, as Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies and Professor Catherine Pakaluk of Catholic University of America recently demonstrated in a friendly social media debate. Is the decline of U.S. fertility a policy problem or a culture problem? Pakaluk, whose book on the subject is set to release this spring, argues that the cultural influences of religion and large-family peers are key to reversing the United States’s downtrending birth rates, citing Israel as her capstone example. Stone, meanwhile, countered that demography does not change significantly at the large family level: The biggest difference would be made if two-child mothers became three-child mothers, a needle which still seems most predictably moved by policy. 

These are fine debates to have, and Stone and Pakaluk are both the good sort to have them, but perhaps the better answer is simply that we need both. What China teaches us is not that child tax credits are never helpful, nor that the culture a woman is raised in has no affect on her fertility. It teaches us that both culture and state may be good and useful husbandmen, both may encourage a flourishing, fertile populace when used with appropriate nuance, and both will be needed to guide policy makers who hope to reverse the United States’ demographic trend before it reaches the levels now seen in Beijing. As China’s last half decade suggests, neither money nor culture can do much in a hurry.

The post China’s Biological Clock appeared first on The American Conservative.

They’re Not Animals

Politics

They’re Not Animals

When will urban authorities begin to treat the homeless like human beings again?

Old,Homeless,Man,Wearing,Sweater,And,Blanket,Sleeping,On,Cardboard

I have lived in Pittsburgh for the better part of my life, but never knew our city had a motto. Some aimless Google searches led me to benigno numine: by the kind divine will.

The slogan comes from Chatham’s first earl, William Pitt, who evidently preferred the deistic rendering over a more explicitly Christian voluntate Dei. In any case, two city council members seem to be taking the phrase more literally than seriously with a proposal to change the city’s zoning laws to include so-called “temporary managed communities”—city-sanctioned camps for the homeless. 

Julia Felton of the Tribune-Review wrote that one of the sponsors of the legislation, Anthony Coghill of Beechview, told her the sites “would have garbage pickup, lighting, showers and bathrooms.… The city and other partners also could provide mental health services, job placement assistance and other help.” Based on how these encampment proposals have played out across the country, particularly on the West Coast, the crucial distinction is between what would be provided and what could be provided. 

Judge Glock, director of research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told The American Conservative that one of the potential benefits of sanctioned camps is the leverage it could give the city “to clear sidewalks, streets, and parks of existing homeless encampments.” Each proposed encampment in Pittsburgh would provide space for 25 tents, what Coghill called “25 residence [sic].” 

The local CBS affiliate reported that there were between 150 and 200 homeless in the city last month, and a city spokesperson told the same affiliate in October that the city’s policy requiring 10 feet between a tent and a public street or right-of-way would not be enforced until the city “ensure[s] that folks have a credible offer of housing.” The force of any leverage offered by the legislation to clean up the streets is yet to be seen.

Potential downsides of the plan, according to Glock, include the risk that “if there’s not sufficient security there and there’s not sufficient services provided, the camps can descend into chaos fairly quickly.” On the other hand, Hallie Lauer of the Post-Gazette reported that Rachel Nunes, executive director of the city’s Thomas Merton Center, “said police should not patrol the sites.” (The Merton Center has acknowledged its “Role as an Organization with a Primarily White Membership.”) 

While Nunes advocates for a “no-barrier” encampment system, Glock said such environments can be “particularly dangerous. If you’re not going to have things like curfews, sobriety requirements, check-in times, [and] bans on certain behavior, then you’re going to have a more problematic camping site.”

One such problematic site in Phoenix gained national attention in September when Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney ordered the city to clear a homeless encampment known as “the Zone.” Though not sanctioned by the city, this encampment became the valley’s homeless hub to which, the judge’s ruling claimed, Phoenix police officers would offer “courtesy rides” from throughout the city. Blaney’s ruling relied on evidence of the city’s failure to enforce criminal laws, increased violent crime, a growing organized crime element, public drug use, prostitution and public indecency, fire hazards, property crimes, and other factors that proved the city’s strategy of merely observing the Zone was both unsustainable and grounds for triggering public nuisance laws. The judge concluded, “the city will not clean up the Zone unless forced to do so.”

Steve Tully, who represented the nineteen plaintiffs in the case and served as majority leader of the Arizona House in the mid-aughts, told us the properties of his clients were surrounded by inhabitants constructing semi-private structures, operating a drug bazaar, and satisfying biological needs. The plaintiffs’ complaint claimed, “a great humanitarian crisis unfolds as homeless residents of the Zone die on a daily basis.”

Tully said that “people in this debate say, ‘we got to treat them like people.’ And I say to them, ‘yes.’ Now, what does that mean, ‘treat them like people?’ With responsibility, right? Respect them to behave in a certain way. They’re not animals.”

He’s right: They’re not animals. But what can be gained from drawing distinctions between no-, low-, and high-barrier temporary housing requirements absent the city’s willingness to treat most of the city’s inhabitants like people, too? Pittsburgh’s first low-barrier facility, called Second Avenue Commons, does not “have sobriety requirements for people who use their services,” according to the Post-Gazette. “Some low-barrier shelters,” the paper said, “have curfew requirements for people who are staying overnight. A no-barrier shelter wouldn’t have a curfew.”

As Tully said, “We’re going to have a no-law zone? Why?”

The city council has moved the issue along to the city’s planning commission, the same body that granted a $1.6 million loan request for developers seeking to build a structure for, according to the Tribune-Review, “low-income LGBTQ+ seniors.” Benigno numine, indeed.

The post They’re Not Animals appeared first on The American Conservative.

Manuel Rocha: Fanatic, Spy—and My Colleague

Politics

Manuel Rocha: Fanatic, Spy—and My Colleague 

The FBI’s revelation that former State Department official Manuel Rocha was a mole for Communist Cuba indicates a pathetic ideological zealotry in the face of reality.

Yangiyer,,Uzbekistan,-,May,11,,1963:,Residents,Welcomed,Fidel.

It is impossible to read the U.S. Attorney complaint against Ambassador Manuel Rocha without deep sadness and outrage. As a fellow Foreign Service officer, I worked alongside Manuel in Havana and feel personally betrayed (as surely others do, too). As of this writing, Rocha has not made any public admissions, but the damning narratives in the court filing present many similarities with the case of Alger Hiss, perhaps the most notorious of all American ideological spies. Serving as an American diplomat, Hiss spied for mass-murderer Stalin, while Rocha’s loyalty was to the tyrant Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. 

While the prosecution’s case is still coming out, the basic indictment unmasks Rocha’s blind devotion to the Cuban dictatorship, which also puts him in company with espionage agents Ana Montes and Kendall Myers, other U.S. officials who violated their allegiances to their country over decades to serve Fidel Castro’s revolution. If a worldly man like Rocha swallowed Castro’s ideological flim-flam and held onto it for an incredible forty years, there are probably still other undiscovered American officials out there also hiding a clandestine record of service to the Cuban dictatorship.

Alger Hiss and Manuel Rocha (as well as Montes and Myers) have in common that they apparently did not betray the United States for any financial or material gain. They worked instead for their own idealistic brands of Marxism, the class-struggle ideology that unleashed so much 20th century conflict and today has been repackaged as a social-justice weapon to push race and gender revolution. It seems probable that Rocha, like Montes and Myers, was somehow infected in adolescence by romanticized visions of Fidel and Che, marching in fatigues, cutting sugar cane, dispossessing property owners and making four-hour speeches. 

It is one thing to have caught the Fidel-Che virus as a teenager, in the early days of the revolution, when Cubans of goodwill and their friends wanted to modernize their country. Yet, as with all revolutions, human nature triumphed over Fidel’s empty promises and lies. Without Soviet subsidies, Cuban society imploded, and Castro fully bared his brutal and bloody soul. By the 1990s, to work as a foreigner for Castro’s dictatorship (openly or secretly as a deep mole in the U.S. government) required much more than youthful idealism or ideological abstractions; it required absolute fanaticism.

The story of Alger Hiss can help us to better understand Rocha. Hiss was famously exposed by Whitaker Chambers, whose best-selling autobiography, Witness, is a must-read conservative classic. Witness detailed the espionage case against Hiss, whose years of perfidy as a Soviet agent carried him all the way to the historic 1945 Yalta conference as a senior State Department advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. 

Witness also delved thoughtfully into what motivated otherwise normal people into taking up the Marxist cause. Having once been a communist and Soviet operative himself, Chambers recounted how Marxism seduces vulnerable idealists who want to make a better world; ultimately, however, the Marxist revolution is an ideological con game that disillusions and destroys many adherents and transforms others into bitter-end fanatics. Today, faced with the failures of communism, Castro apologists, unrepentant fellow-travelers, and agents argue that their struggle to defend the revolution was not about excusing the regime’s many mistakes, but about stopping the interventionist policies of the colossus El Norte.  

That self-serving “blame America” argument is as unpersuasive as the justifications that Western communists made in defending Stalin’s bloody purges in the 1930s and the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. For someone like Manuel Rocha, who served in Havana as a U.S. diplomat and witnessed firsthand the depravities of Castro’s dictatorship, it would have required extreme fanaticism and self-delusion to remain a deep-cover Fidel agent; to stay loyal to such a criminal regime required cult-like devotion.

Rocha saw firsthand all the abuses that were attributable to Castro’s totalitarianism: millions of Cubans forced into economic idleness and the resulting poverty; no free press, media or expression; corrupt officials rewarded with houses, cars and travel privileges; Potemkin hospitals with no medicine, while Cuban doctors were sent abroad; and above all, a Stalinist state security apparatus that destroyed Fidel’s enemies. 

At some level, Rocha must have comprehended that the Cuban revolution was a myth. Castro and his collaborators wanted nothing but raw power, just like any old-fashioned Latin American caudillos. They skillfully manipulated the empty threat of U.S. intervention and el bloqueo yanqui as just useful propaganda tools to crush their internal opposition. In the face of such a stark reality, only fanatics refuse to reassess their values and commitments; only zealots stay loyal to obvious lies. 

It is doubtful that Rocha ever read Witness, although part of his Foreign Service persona, very cleverly, was to present himself to his colleagues as right-of-center politically. Manuel’s deceptive act was very good, and it caught my attention when we first met in the summer of 1995 in Havana, after State Department assignments brought us together in the U.S. Interests Section. USINT was the de facto American embassy in Havana, which Fidel allowed to re-open only because he demanded that anti-revolutionary Cubans, whom he contemptuously denounced as gusanos or “worms,” be quickly processed off the island. 

Conservative FSOs are relatively few, and those who admit it publicly even fewer, so Manuel made a good start with me. We served together two years in the small USINT community, sharing conversations in meetings and brief hallway encounters, usually lambasting Castro’s struggling regime. My hope today is that deep-cover Marxist Manuel at least chalked me up as counter-revolutionary to be shot and not just, as Lenin would have said, one more useful liberal idiot. 

We were not close, in part because Rocha outranked me; he was USINT’s deputy principal officer, the number two U.S. diplomat in Havana, supervising all staff and post activities. Observing his work, most of us agreed that the Colombia-born, naturalized American Rocha was smooth and clever, with exceptional diplomatic talents that included native Spanish. He was, yes, even very likeable. 

Natural gifts in dealing with people serve diplomats well, and they serve spies even better. Like the notorious Hiss, Rocha had attended all the right Ivy League schools and had made extensive connections with everybody in the Washington foreign-policy establishment who worked Latin America. Rocha was clearly a rising Foreign Service star, destined for an ambassadorship which he later got in his Bolivia assignment. 

Although few details are public as of this writing, the likely damage of Rocha’s treachery to U.S. policy in Latin America cannot be minimized. In recruiting Rocha, probably when Manuel was a young idealist in 1973 Chile, influenced both by Allende’s Marxism and Pinochet’s coup against it, Cuba’s Dirección General de Inteligencia made a small investment with a big payout. Over his long career, which included work on the NSC staff, Rocha was indeed in a position to steal much information and subtly influence policy in a pro-Castro direction. During his posting in Havana and in other assignments abroad, Rocha likely double-crossed numerous anti-Castro Cubans, particularly democratic and human-rights activists who put their trust in American hands. That was the very real human cost of Rocha’s treachery.

Yet I doubt he changed history, or even meaningfully put U.S.-Cuban relations on a different path. Rocha would have been one more intelligence source of many, admittedly very highly placed, but Cuba’s DGI had—no doubt still has—many clandestine operatives in the United States, and all their information went into Castro’s hopper. Moreover, Fidel was constantly wary that sources could be double agents; the paranoid Cuban leader could never had been fully confident that Rocha stayed loyal to the revolution. 

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration went through a love-hate diplomatic courtship with Havana, which decidedly ended in hate.  A product of 1960s radical chic, the young Bill Clinton himself was surely smitten with Che’s revolutionary excitement. As a hard-nosed politician, Governor Clinton had lost a re-election because of mismanaging rioting Cubans jailed in Arkansas, and President Clinton had faced a massive and chaotic rafter crisis of desperate Cubans going to sea, sparked when Fidel unleashed them on South Florida. 

Although Castro was always trouble, a too-eager President Clinton thought he could maneuver the wily dictator into a historic rapprochement, built on parlaying the 1994–95 American-Cuban migration accords into a new Caribbean detente. Clinton wanted to be the American president remembered for “normalizing” bilateral relations with Havana, a dubious distinction that was destined to go to Barack Obama. 

Ultimately, President Clinton’s diplomatic initiative failed because Castro yet again revealed his true colors in February 1996 by ruthlessly ordering Cuban MiG fighter jets to shoot down unarmed airplanes piloted by the Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue. But the president declined, wisely, to rise to the bloody provocation, refusing to go down a path that possibly could have made the U.S. military responsible for Castro’s broken-down country.  

Instead, the White House reimposed a freeze on many nascent bilateral activities, such as direct airline flights, while killing talk of ending the trade embargo. Further, the president made common cause with an unlikely ally, anti-communist Senator Jesse Helms. Congress passed the hardline Helms-Burton legislation, today known as the Cuban Libertad Act of 1996, as another U.S. policy tool to squeeze the bandit Fidel. Rocha would have had little to no influence on those large events. 

As his former friends and colleagues await news of his judicial fate, it is probable that Manuel will never renounce his service to Castro; the authentic fanatic descends down the stairs into the bunker with his Führer when all is lost. In dismissing his perfidy, Rocha will swell in pride as a Hero of the Revolution; he will tell himself that he was much more than a pedestrian “spy,” but instead part of the select revolutionary vanguard who ensured that small minds and bungling yanqui policies did not go off the rails and start a war with Cuba. He will tell himself he fought to push human nature into the brave new world that Fidel and Lenin promised is coming.  

Above all, Manuel will remind himself in the silence of his empty prison cell, he was smarter than everybody else, just like Alger was.

The post Manuel Rocha: Fanatic, Spy—and My Colleague appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Thousand Needlepoints of Light

Par : Nic Rowan
Culture

A Thousand Needlepoints of Light

The dedication of a pillow marks the passing of an American—something.

January,13,,2007:,National,Cathedral,Or,Cathedral,Of,Saint,Peter

It is a melancholy thing to reread the speech that George H.W. Bush gave in September 1990 at the laying of Washington National Cathedral’s final stone. “We have constructed here this symbol of our nation’s spiritual life, overlooking the center of our nation’s secular life,” he said, “a symbol which combines the permanence of stone and of God—both of which will outlast men and memories—a symbol that carries with it a constant reminder of our moral obligations.”

True words, but I don’t think Bush could have guessed that, even before he died, the Cathedral would already be outlasting memory. These days the church is cavernous, echoey, and broken—shaken a decade ago by an earthquake from which it will probably never recover—still a reminder of our moral obligations, though now, I think, the thing looks more like a warning. In that same speech, Bush remarked that whenever he looked up Wisconsin Avenue and saw the Cathedral, seemingly floating over the city, he felt as if God himself were issuing a challenge. I know that feeling well; I suspect even those with no faith at all, walking down on the Virginia side of the Potomac and happening to look up, know it too. 

Earlier this week, I found myself in the Cathedral for what will likely be the penultimate Bush family ceremony to occur within its walls—George W. Bush’s funeral, of course, will be the last. Finally, five years after the president’s death, the Cathedral’s volunteer needlepoint committee had organized and completed a commemorative kneeling cushion in the elder Bush’s honor. There are more than two thousand pieces of needlepoint in the church, many of them designed and stitched by volunteers, those excellent women who, until rather recently, were never in short supply. 

Bush’s cushion is part of a long-running series of kneelers that pay tribute to famous and important Americans. There are about two hundred of them, and they are collected in the Cathedral’s Saint John’s Chapel, one of my favorite places in the whole building. The selection and presentation of these kneelers is a catalog—in a goofy way that only 20th-century Episcopalians could have devised—of American saints. 

Most of the dead presidents are represented there. (I sometimes wonder if the last few holders of that office will make the cut.) The mainstays of our national literature are also represented, as well as our scientists, men of industry, and war heroes. Each cushion attempts to represent the high points of the saint’s life, some with more success than others. 

Washington Irving’s cushion, for instance, is a straightforward affair: Rip Van Winkle, the Headless Horseman, Tarrytown. Willa Cather’s requires a little bit more interpretation: It depicts a few books within the outline of the state of Nebraska. In my opinion, the most amusing of the cushions is that of poor Gerald Ford. The needlepoint committee chose to represent his life with the presidential seal, the outline of a football, an Eagle Scout badge, and the dome of the Capitol.

Bush’s own cushion is more Ford than Irving. It depicts the presidential seal, his World War II plane, an abstract rendition of his estate in Kennebunkport, and, in a self-referential nod, National Cathedral. When it is brought into the church, at the tail end of the procession for evensong, it is treated with the reverence due to a sacred object. The presidential historian Jon Meacham (also a canon of the Cathedral) preaches over the cushion in his clerics, reminding the crowd gathered in the Great Choir that, for all his faults, Bush saw himself as a servant of God and attempted in his way to live up to that self-conception. It was an admirable, if somewhat limited, faith.

At length, the dean of the Cathedral, the Very Reverend Randolph Marshall Hollerith, ascended to the high altar where he blessed the cushion as it lay there alone, like a Eucharistic offering.

“Almighty God, we thank you that you have put it into the hearts of your people to make offerings for your service, and have been pleased to accept their gifts,” he said. “Be with us now and bless us as we set apart this cushion to your praise and glory and in honor of George Herbert Walker Bush; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”   

A lot of people wring their hands over this kind of thing. Civil religion, even in its most absurd forms, will always be suspect to most Americans. But all of us there that night are Washingtonians; we are bound by civil religion. After Hollerith blessed the cushion, he led the congregation in giving God thanks for permitting the handiwork of the volunteer needlepoint committee to glorify him: “Solomon beautified the sanctuary, and multiplied the vessels of the temple. Oh, the majesty and magnificence of God’s presence!” And the congregation responded dutifully: “Oh, the power and the splendor of his sanctuary!”

When the ceremony ended, the crowd of blue blazers and Shetland sweaters did not leave immediately. Instead, they quietly formed an orderly line to pay their respects to the cushion, as Catholics do to the cross on Good Friday. I stood in the back and waited until almost everyone had gone, leaving the cushion alone on the altar. The last light of evening faded. By the end, the church was dark.

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State-Sanctioned Chaos at the Imperial Capital

Par : Jude Russo
Politics

State-Sanctioned Chaos at the Imperial Capital

The nation’s crime rate is spiking.

Washington,Dc,,Usa,-,October,12,,2018:,Police,Security,Officer

Things are getting pretty stupid in the nation’s capital. It’s almost an axiom of policing that crimes are less likely to happen in the presence of a police officer. This isn’t a new idea; it is the entire premise of the modern police force as envisioned by Robert Peel. Jane Jacobs takes it as a fundamental principle in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It has been tested repeatedly and found to be sound—maybe the only real gold-plated rule for reducing crime. No wonder the cops, even near the height of the post-Floyd anti-police mania, remained overwhelmingly popular across all demographic segments; Americans of every background told pollsters they wanted the same levels of police presence in their communities—or more.

So you might read the news about D.C.’s crime troubles and think an obvious solution is in the offing. Hire more officers, put ‘em on the street, we say. And crime troubles there are—at this writing, homicide, up 35 percent year-to-date, robbery, up 67 percent. Auto theft is up 96 percent, an increase that beggars belief. When the police chief tells a local radio station that the force is down by 500 officers, the obvious solution becomes yet more obvious. Take our money and hire more officers! we repeat, pleadingly. Well, city officials explain, it’s not that easy—being a cop has become unattractive for various reasons, not least burdensome strictures on actually chasing and catching criminals.

Fair enough. Yet the city’s interim solution to auto theft, buying a bunch of tracking tiles and distributing them to car owners so the vehicles can be tracked down at some unspecified time after the fact, is insulting. The emergency hiring of non-police contractors to patrol schools is insulting. The fact that this occurs as the city can find hundreds of millions of dollars to run a sportsbook that loses money—have you ever heard of a bookie losing money?—is insulting. (If you were to give me $215 million over five years, which I would like but not necessarily recommend, I think that I could run a betting operation that makes money. You might be better off using it to solve the police recruiting problem.) 

D.C.’s government is not very good at doing many of the things governments are supposed to do, whether it’s law enforcement or maintaining basic infrastructure. You may be forgiven if you think they are simply not trying when you see things like their resistance to punishing misbehavior on public transit or the mass down-scheduling of crimes like, well, carjacking. In fact, the only conclusion a reasonable person could draw is that the members of the D.C. City Council actively and passionately hate their constituents, the poorest of whom bear the brunt of the city’s descent into bare savagery. 

Yet the city is rather good at other things—tax collection comes to mind. (The efficient vigor of D.C.’s tax apparatus in fact, paradoxically, threatens its revenues this year.) Or rolling out licensing for cannabis stores. Or building new speed cameras for revenue. Generally speaking, cultivating problems for law-abiding citizens in the name of revenue generation seems to be a great strength of the city government. (The failed sportsbook is the exception.) This state of affairs has been described before, by the disgraced Washington Times columnist Sam Francis:

This condition, which in some of my columns I have called “anarcho-tyranny,” is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

It bears emphasizing that this is not happening in some afterthought city in a hinterland; this is the capital of the United States, the seat of political power in what was once called unironically the free world. Congressmen are being carjacked.

Decline isn’t always a choice, but when it happens unprompted in the capital of the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth, it is laughable to say that it has to be this way. The decay of the American polity comes most often at the hands of politicians who are set on cultivating privilege without power or its responsibilities. As the state declines, so do impartial justice and equality before the law; as these decline, so does civil society, which further saps the state.

It is hard to rise, but easy to fall. If Washington continues down this path, you don’t need to look to Brazil or to South Africa for a vision of the future. Just drive up to Baltimore.

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A Crowd of Conservative Warriors

Politics

A Crowd of Conservative Warriors

State of the Union: The Conservative Partnership Institute’s new initiative will provide mentorship to the upcoming conservative generation.

Washington,Dc,,Us,Capitol,Building,In,A,Sunny,Day.

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) hosted their inaugural Bellator Awards Gala on November 14 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The gala boasted a variety of notable speakers and impressive awardees, all equally committed to bolstering the conservative movement in America—especially within the offices of Capitol Hill. CPI, along with their new initiative, the Conservative Partnership Academy (CPA), is confident that their institution will be on the front lines of defending conservative principles: Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania called CPI “the most consequential organization on the hill.”

Rebecca Dunn, a leading philanthropist who, along with her husband, Bill Dunn, helped launch CPA, addressed the crowd, asserting that “freedom will not be preserved without warriors”—one of the recurring nods to the gala’s name inspiration, “bellator,” which means “warrior” in Latin. She stressed how each person in the room has the ability to serve as a warrior for the conservative cause.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the gala’s keynote speaker, detailed his history with and passion for CPI and its goals. He praised the future generation of conservatives CPI has set out to find, saying:

As I look around at the conservative warriors in this room, the next generation is here. The next Mark Meadows is here, the next Scott Perry is here, the next Ed Corrigan is here, the next Mollie Hemingway is here…. We could not do what we do without being surrounded by principled warriors who love America.

The Bellator Awards Gala provided an environment in which conservative “warriors” could come together and begin planning for the future of the movement. A lot still remains to be seen: CPI’s vision of “Patriot Row,” a campus for conservative institutions, has yet to be fully realized, and the 2024 fellowship cycle has yet to begin. But if up-and-coming conservatives adhere to the mission of CPI and its benefactors, we may rightly look forward to the conservative movement of tomorrow.

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False Orthodoxies on the Right

Culture

False Orthodoxies on the Right

Political theology isn’t helpful for coalition-building.

National,Harbor,,Md,Us,-,Mar,3,,2023:,Nikki,Haley

There is an ideological battle taking place on the right. Old-guard Republicans, formed in the era from Goldwater to Trump, seem to have taken certain political tenets as principles that cannot be compromised. As times and circumstances change, these characters do not change and don’t seem to understand how a conservative could question the old orthodoxies.

There are many examples of this old guard mentality in the current GOP, but one will suffice to make the point. Nikki Haley wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago explaining how the answer to critiques of capitalism is simply to double down and be more capitalistic. In Haley’s world, there are really only pure capitalists and socialists; anyone in the middle is “pushing a watered-down or hyphenated capitalism, which is the slow path to socialism.” Any conservative who might think it prudent to “advocate for more tax credits here, more subsidies there, more mandates for this, more regulations for that…would merely give government more power over businesses, workers and families. It differs from socialism only in degree.” Any advocacy for tax credits, subsidies, or regulations of any kind, for any purpose, is just a step toward socialism. 

In the face of such zealous commitment to the free market as a first principle, many younger New Right conservatives are tempted to dismiss the old guard with exasperation. This is unproductive. Conservatives should resist the temptation to simply dunk on those they see as neocons (or Zombie Reaganites, or whatever) and try to get to the bottom of what’s really going on here.

On the free market, to continue the example, Nikki Haley and company are not all wrong. Read Haley’s recent comments on the campaign trail and many of her economic complaints ring true. Yes, government spending is out of control. The federal government has entangled itself in every area of human life and is burning trillions of dollars we don’t have in the process. Yes, this is irresponsible. Yes, much of this spending is not the proper domain of a distant federal government, and would be better handled on the local level. 

The problem is not necessarily the policy proposal or criticism itself, but the mistaken elevation of political positions to doctrinal orthodoxies. It is not the particular economic proposals that are concerning so much as the religious zeal with which certain Republicans defend them and essentially label dissenters as heretics. Perhaps this is a particular temptation of modernity because humans are religious creatures, yearning to find purpose and truth beyond themselves. As traditional religious belief and practice have waned even among conservatives, perhaps political orthodoxy has filled the void once properly filled by religion. Conservatives are taking the concept of unbending doctrines, of religious orthodoxies, into the political realm where the concept does not belong.

This is an unspoken, even unconscious, issue that is creating tension on the right. As noted above, many old guard Republicans speak of concepts like the free market or free trade as if they are first principles, uncompromisable orthodoxies that separate the sheep from the goats, the true conservatives from those merely on the “slow path to socialism.” But where is the scripture passage, the sacred tradition, the ancient text of conservative dogma that requires adherence to something like the free market? 

It is quite possible to reject free market absolutism without abandoning conservatism and becoming a socialist. As Oren Cass points out in his excellent review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc. in First Things:

We resort to government rationing only in times of duress because we recognize that, applied widely, such schemes would destroy economic vitality and concentrate dangerous levels of power. We reject calls to seize the means of production and bring about a communist utopia because we understand how much more coercive, unjust, and inefficient that utopia would be. Insofar as coercion is rooted in power imbalances, which emerge inevitably from other inequalities, any society that accepts unequal outcomes must accept some degree of coercion as well. But these are arguments for prudence, not for the market fundamentalism that ignores shortcomings and trade-offs entirely.

This discloses the hollowness of the argument that all those who are not pure capitalists are simply sliding toward socialism. In reality, there are many competing goods; any prudent government accepts trade-offs. In times of war or true emergency, the populace accepts government rationing of certain necessities. There is an understanding that there are exigencies for which “the market” has no adequate response. The “pure capitalist” utopia exists only in the mind of Ayn Rand, not in any actual society. 

If a conservative thinker observes a social imbalance or a grave wrong, something that seriously harms the common good or damages a conservative institution such as the family, it is not “unconservative” to suggest that perhaps this is a problem of sufficient gravity for which the free market does not offer a solution.

Much of the time, the free market produces good results. Central government planning often fails to achieve its goals. As Cass points out in the passage above, too much allowance for government coercion over economic affairs leads to dangerous levels of power concentrated in big government. Usually, the appeal to local solutions is the best (or the least bad) solution to a problem. 

The point is not the desired outcome, but the principled stance behind it. It is problematic when a large swath of the conservative movement has (more or less consciously) adopted concepts like free trade or free market absolutism as doctrines that must be accepted to be a true conservative. Conservatism is about preserving the common good, particularly through the institutions and traditions handed down through the ages. Conservatives emphasize the need for strong families, as well as local institutions from churches to vibrant towns, as indispensable parts of a good society. Free markets may help achieve prosperity for families and churches and towns. But if this is often true, it is not absolutely or necessarily so. Conservatism has no catechism where one will find the necessity of holding to free market absolutism to be the true mark of a believer. 

Conservatives must always ask what they are seeking to conserve. If the answer is “the free market” or “economic prosperity,” perhaps it is worth stopping and asking if one has unwittingly adopted as an end what is supposed to be a means. Human flourishing, the common good, strong families, and tight-knit communities: these should be the ends we seek. 

The right cannot have productive conversations about its platform or policy priorities if there is such fundamental misunderstanding about what is necessary to be a conservative. If a conservative holds to a principle such as the free market, free trade, limited government, that is fine. But let him explain why these are good principles. And let him realize that these are not religious orthodoxies of conservatism that have existed from time immemorial, but rather ideas adopted for certain times and circumstances. It is reasonable to hold such views, but not with the “no exceptions” mentality with which a Christian holds to the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Let us question our political orthodoxies (and probably shed many of them in the process) so we can make possible the big-tent conservatism that can focus on the true ends of politics: virtue and the common good.

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Imperial Follies in the Holy Land

Foreign Affairs

Imperial Follies in the Holy Land

There was, once, a very different conservatism.

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Anyone who has read James Barr’s phenomenal duology (often found as a good affordable pack to buy from Amazon) on Britain’s last days as an empire in the Middle East should be fascinated at the current British trajectory. The imperial Tories considered Israeli Kibbutzniks as both a socialist endeavor and an American influence operation for taking over the imperial British sphere in the Middle East. (Rightly, as it turned out.) British Tories also didn’t forget the early Jewish terrorism and ritual humiliation of the British army. These are recorded facts, not judgements. Tempora mutantur and all that. 

For the uninitiated, A Line in the Sand and Lords of the Desert chart the dying days of British hegemony and imperial arrogance and myopia—particularly relevant today. The American Middle East policy wasn’t altogether altruistic. Britain was hollowed out after the two world wars. Oil was the prime commodity for a great power; America risked being tariffed out if Britain continued as an empire. The Atlantic Charter created by Churchill to save the empire from the Nazis, incidentally, fueled the nationalistic impulses that took down the empire itself. Of course, the Soviets didn’t help in neither the Middle East nor Africa. 

The original sin was, as always, revolutionary liberal zeal in the educated class. The Brits love a Lawrence of Arabia figure opposed to tyranny, helping the subaltern foment revolutions against higher powers. Byron and the Romantics despised Castlereagh, not just because of the loss of Napoleon Bonaparte, but because Castlereagh was blue-blooded, prudent, and farsighted enough to make Napoleon impotent by packing him off and helping Metternich and Nesselrode restore the ancien regime instead of making Boney a martyr. 

A similar prudential instinct from Lord Lansdowne was overruled in 1917, resulting in the destruction of Germany as a great power and the collapse of the Ottomans. The vacuum that resulted in the Middle East after Arab Larry’s misadventures and the successive Arab revolts sowed the seeds of future turmoil. Britain struggled to balance the competing forces of Arab nationalism, political Islam, and Zionism. And after that overstretch in Palestine, came the second world war in Europe and India. 

The British officer class still had its own momentum and imperial instincts in those early Cold War days. Even in 1948, Britain was playing a balancing role. For example, research shows that British involvement in the 1948 war was intended to save a stalwart and timeless imperial ally, the King of Jordan: 

The army of King Abdullah’s Transjordan that went to war with Israel in the Arab– Israeli conflict of 1948–49 – the Arab Legion, later the Jordanian army – was a remarkable military unit. First, some 37 British officers and 25 British non-commissioned officers (NCOs) led the army; second, the Legion was the most effective Arab army in 1948, in large measure because Britain as Abdullah’s ally led, funded, trained, and equipped it. It was the only Arab army in 1948 that covered itself in glory, defeating Israel in two sets of battles in and around Jerusalem’s old city and at Latrun (15 May–18 July), interrupted by a ceasefire (11 June–8 July). Most British Servicemen in the Legion were seconded from the British army, some had private contracts with Abdullah, and three were detached from the colonial service, including the Arabic-speaking supreme commander of the Legion, former army officer John Bagot Glubb.

The Spectator quoted British officers in Jordan:

At the inception of the Emirate, however, the collapse of Turkish rule had left the country without a force to maintain law and order…. Despite difficulties of language and temperament the vast majority of the British became fast friends with the Arabs they were training. I speak from experience when I say that without exception the British were amazed by the mental receptiveness of the Arab soldier, and his ability to master the control of complicated instruments of war such as wireless, guns and armoured cars.

The balance didn’t last. Britain lacked the interest, money, and the manpower to garrison the Middle East after the loss of India. Arab nationalism was initially supported by the Soviets, and Israel was backed by America; the forces of that superpower rivalry overwhelmed Britain acting alone. 

Christianity gave way to secularism among the officer class and bureaucracy, taking away another primary concern of safeguarding Jerusalem. Reactionary Tories with their instinctive independence of thoughts as well as Yankee-phobia mostly died out. Others saw America as a force-multiplier to older imperial power and visualized Britain as the “Greeks to America’s Rome”—although, given the British push in Iraq, Libya, and currently in Ukraine, one can debate how good it has been in effect for the new Rome upon the Potomac. 

It is ironic, then, that the Americans wanted to stop Britain from leaving the Middle East altogether. “For God’s sake, act like Britain!” Secretary of State Dean Rusk demanded from Britain’s Foreign Secretary George Brown as London decided to pack up from Aden, its last major imperial outpost, exhausted and unable to quell an Arab insurgency. 

The British destruction of a mellow and hollowed-out Ottoman power resulted in her own overstretch and sowed the seeds of permanent conflict; similarly, in a curious way, the American hand in slowly eroding British power in the Middle East earned the U.S. in a burden without anyone to share it with, and from which the U.S. is still unable to retrench. 

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My Evening With Augusto

Foreign Affairs

My Evening With Augusto

Half a century after the event, conservatives should reflect on the 1973 military coup in Chile and draw lessons for a modern America First foreign policy.

Santiago,,Chile,-,October,17,,2013:,Collage,Of,The,Newspapers

Background chatter echoed in the ambassador’s reception hall, forcing me, a greenhorn American diplomat, to lean in closer. My elderly questioner spoke Spanish in a high, almost squeaky, voice with a heavy Chilean accent. The one-way conversation was friendly and warm, even avuncular: “How long have you been posted to Santiago? Have you enjoyed excursions to Viña del Mar, our beautiful beach resort? Did you travel yet down to see Chile’s incredible mountains, lakes, and forests in the south? When are you going next to the country’s great port city of Valparaiso?”

The friendly chit-chat was over after a few minutes, as a relaxed General Augusto Pinochet, bedecked in his grey tunic and accompanied by a discreet military aide, quietly worked the room. 

I was struck by Pinochet’s unassuming manner. His immense pride in Chile was no surprise, but his unpretentious personal style contrasted starkly with the intense vilification from his many enemies, who not only constantly denounced Pinochet as Latin America’s worst dictator, but had actively tried to assassinate him.

Many Chileans are marked by a polite reserve that separates them, for example, from the flash and bravado of their Argentine neighbors across the Andes. In that style, Pinochet neither expected nor created any pomp and circumstance at the small cocktail gathering. On that particular evening, he acted as though he were with old friends, happy to put aside past differences in dealing with the gringos to enjoy good conversation and fine Chilean wine. 

It was 1995, the beginning of Chile’s austral winter, and U.S. Ambassador Gabriel Guerra-Mondragón—President Clinton’s man in Santiago—had decided that, after years of the State Department giving Pinochet the cold shoulder, a bit of a personal rapprochement might ease some anti-American tension in the ranks of the Chilean military and among the general’s conservative political allies. At that moment, the bilateral relationship was focused on a free-trade deal, and all American diplomacy really wanted from Pinochet was to help nudge him towards the exit door off Chile’s national stage.

Pinochet was then in his 70s, having grudgingly but peacefully given up the Chilean presidency after the referendum that ended his rule in 1990. Even after having served 16 years as dictator, Pinochet still had won 43 percent of the referendum vote from Chileans who wanted to keep him in power. Defeated by the ballot box, the general moved out of Santiago’s famous La Moneda presidential palace, but continued serving as comandante-en-jefe of the Chilean army. By the early 1990s, Pinochet doubtless thought he was in the final senior statesman phase of a long career of service to his country. 

But his was not to be a quiet retirement, as Pinochet’s many enemies, both in Chile and abroad, would launch a ceaseless prosecutorial criminal campaign to put him in the dock. He died in 2006 in Santiago, under house arrest, facing hundreds of criminal charges.

This September marks the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s 1973 coup against the Marxist President Salvador Allende. With half a century of hindsight, we see an event that has not only been intensely researched and written about, typically by left-leaning historians, but one that still calls for fresh and thoughtful reexamination. Better understanding of Pinochet’s coup can help inform contemporary American foreign affairs, particularly on the wisdom of Washington’s direct intervention in countries to advance the U.S. national interest.   

For international leftists and most American liberals, the Chile coup story is long settled, and it is one of Yanqui arrogance, meddling, and human rights abuses. For them, Washington’s support for the Pinochet regime represents the classic example of a major U.S. international blunder, a Cold War intervention that served only to overturn a legitimately elected government and install a ruthless dictatorship. It made Washington, in their blame-America-first Weltanschauung, principally responsible for Chile’s tragedy.  

The Left’s retelling of the Pinochet drama is choreographed with many of their favorite bad actors: President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA. Later, even the likes of Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” arrive on the stage to implement neoliberal capitalism. Rarely do the leftist historians fault the Marxist radicalism of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and their revolutionary efforts to turn the Western Hemisphere into “two, three, many Vietnams.”

Today, looking back with Cold War fury long past, a modern America First analysis must ask when, if ever, is a major Chile-like U.S. intervention justified?  Such questions are abstract and hypothetical, of course, and real scenarios are highly dependent on actual circumstances, but surely the answer with hindsight is that such interventions for America Firsters must be rare and extraordinary. They always bring about massive unintended consequences, and demonstrate that Washington planners, however well intended, rarely control events as they play out.

America First policy has learned much from American reversals in recent decades. Today, U.S. interventions, along the lines of Chile in 1973, are justified foremostly in responding to direct foreign threats coming from territory geographically near to the United States. Such a foreign policy tradition is nothing new, long anchored in the Monroe Doctrine. President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft also advocated the same approach, calling such a U.S. security policy focused on the Western Hemisphere “continentalism.”

To intervene or not in Chile was a close call. There is a strong case that some action from Washington was justified. Yet even that conclusion must be weighed against the fact that, as we will examine, Pinochet likely would have launched a coup without any push from the Americans.

Given Cold War Realpolitik, I would suggest that today’s America First practitioners, had they been in Washington making foreign policy in 1973, would have approved of the Nixon-Kissinger response. Given the unique circumstances, most conservatives, even today, would say the U.S. needed to provide some kind of active support to the anti-Marxists in Chile. At the time, the threat from Fidel Castro’s Cuba had the potential to set wildfires across Latin America.  

Our hemisphere was vulnerable to insurgency. In 1967, Bolivian security forces had killed Che Guevara and successfully contained Castroism with only modest U.S. assistance. Chile’s fall into Havana’s orbit, brought about by Allende’s narrow victory in the 1970 election, represented a real new threat in the Americas and was an extraordinary challenge given Cold War dynamics. 

Allende’s playbook of course drew great inspiration from Castro’s revolution, and the impact of clandestine assistance that Havana funneled to Chile is an ignored chapter that needs more attention even today. But Allende’s operational plan of slower revolution was less Cuban and much more comparable to the Chavez-Maduro model that has in recent years destroyed Venezuela. Throughout 1970–73, Allende undermined the country’s established social norms while implementing radical policies that devastated Chile’s economy, with inflation reaching 300 percent.

Nixon-Kissinger had given instructions to pass the word that Washington would support the Chilean armed forces in overthrowing Allende’s government. The CIA station in Santiago, however, actually recruited and partnered with incompetent plotters who brutally botched the job; overthrowing the government in a country like Chile was not easy. Moreover, U.S. analysts had written off Pinochet as an Allende regime loyalist. 

Of course, Pinochet picked up the word on the street that a putsch would be blessed by the gringos, and that fact may have influenced his decision to act. He then led the armed forces that successfully struck against Allende on September 11, 1973. Almost assuredly, the Chilean general and his allies would have undertaken the coup even without the blessing of the United States, and arguably even if the Americans had opposed it.

Pinochet never danced to Washington’s tune, and his coup was never about doing what the United States wanted.  The proximate cause of the coup was always Allende’s disastrous effort to impose Marxism on Chile. Chilean patriots did not need a phone call from Kissinger to act to save their country. They knew even better than Washington policymakers the nature of Allende and his Marxist movement. 

Although his defenders maintain that Allende was not a fanatic, the Marxist president took his own life in the coup, using an AK-47 given him by Fidel Castro. Allende’s defenders further argue that he came to office democratically (true, albeit with a bare plurality); they stress that he wanted to work within the constitutional system to change Chile. That point is arguable, as Allende dispossessed Chilean property owners of all stripes, convincing a majority of Chileans of the era, except those on the extreme Left represented by the socialist and communist parties, that “reforms” were going too fast and dangerously in the wrong direction.

It is doubtful that Pinochet ever read much Edmund Burke, but some of his compatriots did, and they were rightly convinced that Allende was carrying out an illegitimate, revolutionary power grab, dressed up by faux constitutionalism, that would fundamentally change Chile—and likely bring about civil war.  

Chile’s quandary from that dark time is a version of a real dilemma for constitutional democrats everywhere, including Americans, to ponder. What is the appropriate conservative response to radicals who gain control of governmental institutions through legitimate means and then unleash social and economic revolution, all the time claiming they are respecting the very institutions they are destroying? (Here at home, to what extent is the Biden administration employing those very tactics?) 

There is no doubt that Pinochet did much good, particularly in the beginning, by dealing a death blow to Castroism in the Andes, but it is also true that he later became a liability to the anti-communist cause. While Pinochet always defended his extreme actions by saying Chile was in a civil war in 1973, requiring forceful martial law measures, there is no doubt that his security forces often gravely overreached, causing unnecessary human tragedy.

It is also a misreading of history to assert that American support for the general’s coup makes Washington responsible for all the Pinochet regime’s later excesses. Pinochet was never a U.S. puppet, and he acted independently on many things. The general tenaciously held on to presidential power long after American leadership—even under the Reagan administration—wanted him to leave La Moneda. The Pinochet regime’s later brutality, typified by Operation Condor and the Letelier killings in Washington, cannot fairly be seen as inevitable results of the original Nixon-Kissinger decision to intervene. 

One key lesson is that ambitious U.S. foreign policy is rarely as effective in pulling puppet strings and orchestrating events as both many of its proponents and detractors like to think. What can go wrong will go wrong. This Andean tragedy, first brought on by Allende and Castro, was, in the end, a sad example of how even Chilean patriots could be corrupted by unchecked power. 

The post My Evening With Augusto appeared first on The American Conservative.

Playing the Race Card to Protect Chinese Spies

Politics

Playing the Race Card to Protect Chinese Spies

The Wen Ho Lee case taught China that crying racism would trump incriminating facts.

Former Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee wal
Wen Ho Lee (Photo credit should read MIKE FIALA/AFP via Getty Images)

Is it racist to think that a Chinese person is more likely to spy for China than someone with no Chinese ancestry who was born in America?

That was the premise of much of the left-wing opposition to the Justice Department’s so-called China Initiative, its investigation of Chinese technology theft that was launched in 2018 and canceled by the Biden administration in 2022 over claims of ethnic profiling. It is the premise of many news articles written about Chinese scientists leaving the United States in increasing numbers, supposedly because they feel targeted by authorities. Yet if you asked the average man on the street, he would say that taking someone’s country of birth into account in an espionage investigation is just common sense.

Where did the Chinese get the idea that playing the race card would be an effective way to fend off reasonable investigations of suspicious conduct? From the precedent set by the case of Wen Ho Lee in 1999.

When I mentioned Wen Ho Lee at a panel in Washington, D.C., recently, none of the people in the room, mostly twenty-somethings, had any idea who he was. His case was a massive news story during the late Clinton era, one that taught the Chinese a lesson about American vulnerabilities that they are profiting from to this day.

The story of Wen Ho Lee, as it has gone down in history books, runs something like this: An absent-minded computer programmer at Los Alamos cut a few corners on security procedures and for this he was scapegoated as a Chinese spy by the Justice Department, which picked him because he was Taiwanese-born and ethnically vulnerable. The title of Lee’s ghostwritten memoir sums it up: My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy.

According to an August 2000 episode of 60 Minutes, the security lapses Lee committed were very ordinary, the kind of thing many other Los Alamos scientists did when they were in a hurry. The crime of mishandling restricted data, to which Lee pled guilty in exchange for the other charges being dropped, he says he did because he wanted to create backup copies of his work and so transferred the files from a secure to an unsecure network before putting them onto portable tapes.

But it was not just his own work that Wen Ho Lee downloaded. The program called “Big Mac” simulates a nuclear explosion in order to show the effects of design changes on the operations of a bomb. Running a test took hours or days on a Cray supercomputer. Out of 223,000 lines of code, Lee had contributed less than a thousand. He downloaded the whole thing, and more, including weapons designs and sketches.

As soon as Lee became aware that he was under investigation by the FBI, he began deleting the incriminating files from his computer and refused ever to tell authorities where the backup tapes were; he claimed he destroyed them. Far from being a shortcut taken in a hurry, analysts say creating his tape library would have taken Lee at least 40 hours.

Lee’s behavior drew the FBI’s attention because investigators had unrelated reasons to believe there was a spy at Los Alamos. China conducted a nuclear test in 1992 that indicated sudden advances in their miniaturization technology. Their breakthrough bore a striking resemblance to America’s W88 warhead, the kind used on Trident missiles, which meant that either the Chinese had converged on the same design overnight or someone gave it to them. “It’s like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,” one scientist said.

Investigators started with the small circle of people who would have had access to those designs and looked for red flags. Wen Ho Lee had three, in addition to his inexplicable tape library: the call, the meeting, and the hug.

In 1982, Lee called up a Taiwanese-born engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had been forced to resign from his job after being caught at the airport on his way to China carrying classified secrets. Lee had never met the man, but he called him and offered to help him find out who had tipped off the authorities. This phone call was picked up on the FBI’s phone tap of the engineer and then forgotten about for 15 years until Lee himself came under investigation. Lee says he called his countryman merely out of sympathy. One FBI agent who investigated Lee said, “I’m Italian, but I don’t call John Gotti and say, come on, John, I hear the FBI’s after you, can I help you?”

In 1988, on one of his many visits to China, Wen Ho Lee met in his hotel room with Dr. Hu Side, the head of China’s nuclear weapons program. Lee claims nothing improper occurred at this meeting, only that Hu asked him to disclose classified information and he refused. But when Lee was debriefed after his trip and provided a list of all the Chinese scientists he had met, he left off Hu.

In 1994, a Chinese delegation including Hu Side visited Los Alamos. Wen Ho Lee crashed a private meeting to which he had not been invited in order to greet the visitors, and Hu gave Lee a hug. When the Americans asked their translator what the two men were chatting about in Mandarin, the translator replied, “They’re thanking him because the computer software and calculations on hydrodynamics that he provided them have helped China a great deal.”

To those three red flags we might add a fourth: Sylvia Lee, his wife. Officially, Sylvia Lee had an administrative job at Los Alamos; unofficially, she was the lab’s social ambassador to visiting Chinese delegations. Her unofficial duties soon outgrew her official ones, and her bosses were annoyed to find her racking up thousands of dollars in long-distance and international calls on the office phone bill.

Sylvia was a problem employee in other ways. Once, when given an assignment she thought was beneath her, she deliberately deleted the relevant files, including classified designs that belonged to a third-party contractor. Her bosses confronted her, and she admitted that she had deleted the files to teach them a lesson about valuing her work. “Then she played that game of ‘I don’t understand,’ and I was ready to fire her on the spot,” her supervisor recalled. He kept her on at the request of the H.R. department, and also because two CIA agents visited him and implied that they wanted Sylvia to stay where she was.

(Wen Ho Lee played “that game of ‘I don’t understand’” when under interrogation, too. You can observe it in his 60 Minutes interview, and no doubt he also used it with the FBI: Respond to a tough question with a generic answer and hope your evasiveness is chalked up to language trouble.)

The visit by the CIA agents is a reminder that nuclear espionage takes place in a world of mirrors where hidden actors are always at work. Sylvia’s bosses had no idea she was passing information to the FBI and the CIA. When Wen Ho Lee’s case came up for trial in the summer of 2000, the judge originally assigned the case suddenly recused himself without explanation. It was later revealed that a woman connected to the defense accused the judge of making a sexual advance. He denied it but bowed out to keep the allegation from being made public. The judge who replaced him was so sympathetic to Wen Ho Lee that during sentencing he apologized to Lee from the bench. Was this judge switch the result of a deliberate scheme? In the world of espionage, such things do happen.

Why is the Wen Ho Lee case remembered as an example of racist scapegoating? Clearly the FBI had many reasons to be suspicious of Lee apart from his ethnicity, even if, as is often the case with espionage investigations—including the Lawrence Livermore engineer caught red-handed at the airport—they did not have enough to get a conviction in court.

One reason is that Wen Ho Lee had a very good P.R. team. He became a cause celebre among Chinese-Americans, who showered him with donations, and Lee was able to hire high-powered lawyers and first-rate Los Angeles publicists. They knew exactly what kinds of emotional appeals would work on the American public: scientist vs. bureaucrat, one man vs. the system, and, above all, innocent racial minority vs. white bigots. According to the excellent book A Convenient Spy,by journalists Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, the entourage around Lee and his daughter Alberta grew so big and so controlling that his older supporters wondered, “Had Wen Ho and Alberta gone Hollywood?”

It was these consultants who set up the sympathetic press interviews and brought in prominent Chinese-American lesbian activist Helen Zia to help co-write Lee’s memoir. The book itself is not very convincing. For example, Lee says the reason he tried to sneak into his office at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve after his security clearance had been revoked was not to destroy evidence but because “I wanted to continue working on the scientific paper I was preparing” and “somehow I thought that the swipe card might work again at off hours.” Still, the book reassured Lee’s defenders that he would continue proclaiming his innocence.

The second reason Lee was able to paint himself as a martyr is that many powerful people in the Clinton administration did not want to turn over any rocks having to do with Chinese espionage. It is often forgotten now, but Clinton’s second term was rocked by China scandals. Huge sums from foreign donors were funneled to Democratic campaigns by way of Chinese money men such as Charlie Yah-Lin Trie and John Huang. In exchange, bigwigs including People’s Liberation Army officers were given access to the White House, and Huang was given a position at the Commerce Department where he could encourage and monitor the export of sensitive items to Asia. Huang also received security clearance, intelligence briefings, and access to classified documents at Commerce.

A scandal this big should have resulted in an independent counsel and banner prosecutions, but it did not. In September 1999, FBI whistleblowers revealed that the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force had thwarted their investigation—refusing, for example, to pursue a warrant to search Charlie Trie’s office even after incriminating documents including photocopies of checks from foreign donors to Clinton’s legal defense fund were found shredded in his trash. A Wall Street Journal editorial summarized the whistleblowers’ testimony: “What emerges from these FBI accounts is a portrait of not merely a botched investigation but of an active coverup.”

The Wen Ho Lee case broke in the middle of the Chinagate scandal. (Incidentally, another Chinese-American who worked at the Commerce Department and was close friends with John Huang was Hoyt Zia, the brother of Lee’s co-author, Helen Zia.) Accusing Republicans of anti-Asian xenophobia was one way that Democrats downplayed the Chinagate revelations. When the Wen Ho Lee investigation failed to come up with a smoking gun that showed him passing secrets to China, the same people took up his cause as further evidence that only paranoid racists were suspicious of naturalized Asian-Americans.

It is impossible to know for sure, more than 20 years later, whether Wen Ho Lee was a spy. But one thing is certain. Wen Ho Lee is invoked today as an example of why racial profiling of Chinese scientists should be avoided at all costs to avoid targeting blameless people, when that is not, in fact, the lesson of his case at all.

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Blinken Said the Right Thing in Beijing

Foreign Affairs

Blinken Said the Right Thing in Beijing

Critics of Antony Blinken’s comments in Beijing ought to take a look in the mirror.

TOPSHOT-CHINA-US-DIPLOMACY

“He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Earlier this week, the United States’ top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, paid President Xi Jinping a visit in Beijing for the first time since 2018.

Suffice it to say, relations with China have not improved In the intervening years. When former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Xi in October 2018, a burgeoning trade war was top of mind. Concerns about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan surely lingered in the background, but it wasn’t really until China’s crackdown on Hong Kong in 2019 that concerns about China’s near abroad came into focus.

Since then, a global pandemic that not just originated in China but likely leaked out of a Chinese lab ravaged the world. Its disruptions reverberated throughout the world economy, revealing just how fragile the supply chains that keep our globalized arrangement afloat. China has become even more assertive in its near abroad while modernizing and enlarging its military.

Just five years on, it’s the prospect of a real war, not just a trade war, that defines Sino-American relations.

Nevertheless, Blinken set expectations for his Beijing envoy low relative to the daunting task at hand. “It was clear coming in that the relationship was at a point of instability, and both sides recognized the need to work to stabilize it,” Blinken said, justifying his trip. “And specifically, we believe that it’s important to establish better lines of communication, open channels of communication, both to address misperceptions, miscalculations and to ensure that that competition doesn’t veer into conflict.”

After Blinken’s Monday meeting with Xi, the secretary of State hinted that the discourse was contentious. “We have no illusions about the challenges of managing this relationship,” Blinken claimed. “There are many issues on which we profoundly, even vehemently, disagree.”

Xi’s comments struck similar chords. “The competition among major countries is not in line with the trend of the times and cannot solve the problems of the United States itself and the challenges facing the world,” the Chinese president asserted. “China respects the interests of the United States and will not challenge or supplant the United States. Similarly, the United States should also respect China and not harm its legitimate rights and interests.”

Such comments are what’s to be expected from the U.S.–China relationship in 2023. So was another comment from Blinken. At a press conference held at the U.S. embassy in Beijing following Blinken’s meeting with Xi, the secretary of State said, “I raised U.S. concerns, shared by a growing number of countries, about the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] provocative actions in the Taiwan Strait as well as in the South and East China Seas.”

The secretary continued: 

On Taiwan, I reiterated the longstanding U.S. One China policy. That policy has not changed. It’s guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, the Six Assurances.

We do not support Taiwan independence, we remain opposed to any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side. We continue to expect the peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences. We remain committed to meeting our responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act, including making sure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself.

These comments drew the ire of China hawks, Republicans especially. “Blinken flew to Communist China to appease Xi Jinping and state the Biden administration does not support Taiwan’s independence,” tweeted Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “Why won’t this administration stand up to bullies and stand for freedom?” “Blinken Blinks, Cowers To XI in Beijing,” tweeted Fox News’ Sean Hannity with a clip of Blinken’s remarks attached.

While the Biden administration has been hawkish at multiple junctures vis-à-vis Taiwan, particularly in Biden’s previous statements about how the U.S. military would come to Taiwan’s defense if China decided to invade, Blinken’s comments in Beijing were prudent. Blinken simply iterated the United States’ decades-long policy toward Taiwan, which, as Blinken stated, is outlined by “the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, [and] the Six Assurances.”

The pieces of U.S. policy Blinken listed are consistent, the most important among them being the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). Enacted by Congress in 1979, the TRA replaced what some Republicans and China hawks seek, tacitly if not explicitly, today: a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. 

But America’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” that stems from the TRA has delivered the same results as the mutual defense treaty that the U.S. had with Taiwan from 1954 to 1979: China has not invaded. When the U.S. dropped its explicit commitment to defend Taiwan with its blood and treasure, the Chinese did not rush in. When Taiwan transitioned from a military junta to a democracy less than a decade later, China did not scramble its jets. 

It’s the same result, but for a much lower cost to the United States. While the TRA stipulates that the U.S. will provide arms to Taiwan and “resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” that could come from the mainland, the United States is under no obligation to send its sons and daughters to fight another war an ocean away. It leaves the door open to American involvement in a war between China and Taiwan, but leaves what exactly that constitutes up to the Chinese imagination, hence the “ambiguity.” The TRA speaks softly, but carries a big stick.

Furthermore, the effects of strategic ambiguity are felt not only on the mainland but across the strait. Not even Taiwan can be sure what kinds of aid the U.S. will provide if China does attempt to invade. Thus, rather than become a free-rider on the American military, like many European nations have become under NATO’s Article 5 commitments, Taiwan is under constant pressure to maintain defense expenditures. While Taiwan’s defense expenditures likely remain too low given the Chinese threat, the 2.1 percent of GDP it spends annually on its military is higher than most countries with outright mutual defense treaties with the United States. Taiwan’s unimpressive defense expenditures and nonstrategic allocation of those dollars (buying more tanks won’t do you much good when defending a mountainous jungle island from an amphibious assault) is not a consequence of strategic ambiguity. Rather, it’s Taiwan’s hubristic belief that no matter its behavior, America will send its finest to defend the island when bullets begin to fly.

“U.S. policy does not currently commit us to the direct defense of Taiwan. Since it isn’t in our interests to fight a costly war against China for this small island far away from home, this is a good thing,” Will Ruger, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told The American Conservative. “But strategic ambiguity has value by constraining both China and Taiwan from making a destabilizing move away from a not-terrible status quo from the American perspective. This status quo also gives Taiwan, which isn’t currently doing enough, the chance to improve its defensive capability to dissuade any hostile move by China in the future.”

In other words, strategic ambiguity provides the U.S. leverage to encourage Taiwan to increase military funding and modernize, train, and equip its forces to stave off a Chinese invasion. If Taiwan doesn’t take its own defense seriously, why should the United States?

“Ending strategic ambiguity and moving to an American commitment would be strategically unwise to say the least—which is why the Biden administration has walked it back when the president himself has gone off script towards such a move,” Ruger added.

Hawkish Republicans can sound off on Twitter all they want, but any pejorative they levy against Blinken for his comments in Beijing this week ultimately reflects on them. Though the executive retains wide-ranging authority in foreign affairs—too much authority—in this instance, the executive branch is performing its duties within the confines that Congress has established. If Congress wants to drop strategic ambiguity, then it can change the law.

The hawks have tried that. Up to this point, they’ve failed for good reason, but their efforts will continue. This is Washington, after all. Here, when powerful people want a war, they often get it.

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Handicapping the Handicapped

Par : Jude Russo
Culture

Handicapping the Handicapped

If you’re instinctively bothered by betting on the Special Olympics, you should pay attention.

Volunteer,Coaching,Young,Athlete,,Special,Olympics,,Ucla,,Ca

This week sees the sixteenth Special Olympics World Games at Berlin. Seven thousand athletes and their trainers have traveled to the gray city to compete; the games will be televised in the United States on the broadcast channel ABC, on the cable channel ESPN3, and on the streaming service ESPN+. The Games forecast 300,000 spectators in the week of competitions.

The Special Olympics is one of the few popular institutions that enjoy a sterling public image. It is also one of the few institutions dedicated to the old-fashioned amateurist idea that virtue can be pursued and attained for its own good by anyone, irrespective of native ability. (In both respects it differs markedly from the regular modern Olympics, whose integrity and amateurism have always been equivocal and dubious.) 

The World Games, the summit of the local, regional, and national circuits of the Special Olympics, showcase feats of athleticism that not only put your poor correspondent’s modest physical prowess to shame, but also display the best sort of humanistic triumph. Excellence is within reach for all—which is, of course, a different and far more humane standard than mere identity of outcome.

Discipline, deeds of strength, and the soaring ambition of man’s spirit aren’t enough for everyone. If you need an extra jolt, you can make your way to an online sportsbook to lay wagers on the Special Olympians. BetOnline, an Antiguan-registered gambling company, made a splash by announcing that it would be taking bets on individual event outcomes and on aggregate medal counts. Other betting sites are offering similar wagers.

An unusually cretinous and subliterate soft feature for Forbes lays out the case in favor, parroting BetOnline’s statements almost word for word: “It will be interesting to see what reactions come of this barrier-breaking occurrence in sports history, but the bottom line is that as gambling continues to evolve on a global scale, athletes who might otherwise be ignored in Berlin next week are going to get a little extra attention. Gambling not only closes doors to those who become addicted to it, it opens doors to those who would otherwise be overlooked.” 

Well, then. Incredibly, it bears pointing out that there are plenty of things that can be used to draw attention to an event that perhaps ought not be so used—exotic dancers, bear-baiting, flash mobs. Attention is also not quite the same as revenue. BetOnline has pledged a $10,000 donation to a charity benefiting the developmentally disabled; this is hardly the same as giving the Special Olympics a cut of the vig—not that this would be especially desirable either. (The press office for the Berlin games did not respond to The American Conservative’s request for comment.)

There is a hierarchy of justifications used for liberalizing gambling; there is a similar hierarchy of problems associated with it. I address both at greater length in this feature for TAC’s latest print issue, but the short form is as follows. Historically, the privilege of running a gambling concern is granted to historically significant industries or groups that cannot otherwise easily support themselves—industries like horse breeding and racing, groups like charitable organizations and reservation-bound Indians. The new boosters of looser gambling regulation argue that betting will be easier to regulate and its concomitant ills easier to address in a legal environment and that it will boost league and state revenues. Some also argue, libertarianishly, that it is simply none of the government’s business.

The problems associated with a broader gambling regime are several. First is the threat to the integrity of a given game—this is a particularly strong concern for sports betting, and is why the Major League Baseball Players Association and, until recently, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell opposed the spread of sportsbook. (Skeptics of sportsbook legalization may soon see vindication as cases of players betting on games slowly start to come to light.) Second is the cluster of social dysfunctions associated with gambling concerns, foremost of which is gambling addiction itself. Third is the effect on groups who previously relied on the economic rents from a highly regulated gambling industry. (Some Indian tribes have been pauperized by the recent explosion in legal gambling.)

So we arrive at the question of what benefits are derived from allowing Special Olympics sportsbook. It bears no direct benefit for the organization or the athletes; it creates incentives for compromising the games’ unimpeachable integrity and beauty; it will encourage some number of ruined people to continue to make ruinous choices. No state entity—and certainly no American state entity—will derive appreciable revenues from it. At best, it will encourage some number of anhedonic gamesters to turn the bar TV to ESPN3 for a minute or two. What’s a handful or a hundred or a thousand destroyed lives compared to a goosed audience number for ESPN3’s 2 p.m. Thursday broadcast?

One of the dominant processes—perhaps the thematic process—of modern life is breaking down complex systems so the bits can be sold piecemeal, cracking open the piggy bank marked “civilization” to take the bills and leave the change. As nicely detailed by our own John Hirschauer, a broadly temperate society deregulated cannabis use in a paroxysm of greed; now, society is not temperate, and, as it turns out, the profits are not much to write home about either. 

Gambling liberalization is no different. Can we build an industry around online betting on sports events? Yes, we can. Will it bring a host of social ills with it? Yes, it will. Will it destroy some historical industries and disadvantaged groups along the way? Yes, certainly. Will it especially help anyone besides the bookmaker? No, not really. Well, take the bills and leave the change.

In a rare case of taste and morality breaking out on the internet, many people on social media seem to think a Special Olympics sportsbook is crass and unsavory. They are right. Is it too much to hope that it makes them bring more jaundiced eyes to the gaming industry writ large?

The post Handicapping the Handicapped appeared first on The American Conservative.

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