Two global-stage hot spots to keep an eye on

China and India are squaring off in the Himalayas:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India broke his silence on Wednesday over the 20 Indian troopers killed this week by Chinese language forces alongside the nations’ disputed border, warning that his nation was able to “giving a befitting reply.”

In a brief televised speech, Mr. Modi stated that “the sacrifice of our troopers won’t be in useless.”

“The sovereignty and integrity of India is supreme, and no person can cease us in defending that,” he stated. “India desires peace, but when provoked India is able to giving a befitting reply.”

Mr. Modi spoke two days after Chinese language and Indian forces battled with golf equipment and fists in a desolate border area excessive within the Himalayas, the primary lethal border skirmish there greater than 4 many years. The conflict instantly raised tensions between the 2 nations, that are each led by nationalist leaders who need to mission a picture of power at dwelling and to the world.

Both sides has stated it doesn’t need a struggle, at the same time as they’ve blamed the opposite for beginning the conflict and stated they had been able to defend in opposition to additional incursions.

China’s overseas minister, Wang Yi, scolded his Indian counterpart on Wednesday, based on the Chinese language International Ministry. Mr. Wang accused Indian troops of scary the confrontation on Monday by violating an settlement reached days earlier to de-escalate the tensions on the border.

“The Indian aspect should not misjudge the present scenario and should not underestimate China’s agency will to safeguard territorial sovereignty,” Mr. Wang informed the Indian minister of exterior affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in accordance to a statement released in Beijing.

And North Korea has blown up the joint liaison office that handled inter-Korean relations. Kim Yo Jong had described the building as "useless" just before the demolition. And now it's threatening to mass troops at the border. 

We're up to our eyeballs in crises here at home, but it behooves us to keep these on our radar screen.

We're looking at one busy world stage in late February 2019

There is today's second summit between Kim and the VSG:

Although many experts are skeptical Kim will give up the nuclear weapons he likely sees as his best guarantee of continued rule, there was a palpable, carnival-like excitement among many in Hanoi as the final preparations were made for the meeting. There were also huge traffic jams in the already congested streets.
Officials in Hanoi said they only had about 10 days to prepare for the summit — much less than the nearly two months Singapore had before the first Trump-Kim meeting last year— but still vowed to provide airtight security for the two leaders.
“Security will be at the maximum level,” Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Hoai Trung told reporters.
The ultra-tight security will be appreciated by North Korean authorities, who are extremely vigilant about the safety of Kim, the third member of his family to rule the North with absolute power. Kim’s decision to take a train, not a plane, may have been influenced by the better ability to control security.
Vietnam is eager to show off its huge economic and development improvements since the destruction of the Vietnam War, but the country also tolerates no dissent and is able to provide the kind of firm hand not allowed by more democratic potential hosts.

Tensions flare between India and Pakistan in the wake of the recent car-bombing death of 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir. The latest:

Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen Asif Ghafoor, said Indian planes crossed into the Muzafarabad sector of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. He said Pakistan scrambled fighters and the Indian jets “released payload in haste” near Balakot.
India’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, told reporters in New Delhi that Indian fighter jets targeted Jaish-e-Mohammad camps in a pre-emptive strike after intelligence indicated another attack was being planned.

There will surely be more elucidation regarding this development:

The resignation of Iran’s most famous diplomat and the man often seen as the foreign face of Tehran [foreign minister Muhammad Javad Zarif], has plunged Iran’s highest levels of government and media into a momentary sense of bewilderment and lack of certainty. It illustrates not only the differences within the regime but also the ability of news organizations in Tehran to gather news with some levels of independence, more than in other totalitarian regimes. The Iranian Students News Agency, for instance, provides a discussion about various “sources” close to Zarif and President Hasssan Rouhani’s office.

US Vice President Mike Pence met with the Venezuelan president that the US recognizes, Juan Guaido, in Bogota, Colombia yesterday.  Pence announced more sanctions against the on-the-ropes outlaw regime of Maduro, as well as aid for neighboring countries dealing with an influx of desperate Venezuelans.

This is a welcome development:

Britain said on Monday it plans to ban all wings of Hezbollah due to its destabilizing influence in the Middle East, classing the Lebanese Islamist movement as a terrorist organization.

In a world such as this, it behooves post-America to have its wits about it. We shall see if it is up to the task. We certainly have some good folks on the case. I do wish Nikki Haley was still officially involved, but I think the tone she set will still drive policy to some degree.

Tuesday roundup

Great David Harsanyi piece at The Federalist entitled, "Hey, Democrats, The System Doesn't Need to Be 'Fixed' Every Time You Lose an Election":

If you’re under the impression that the system exists merely to facilitate your partisan agenda, it’s not surprising that you also believe it’s “broken” every time things don’t go your way. This is why so many Democrats argue that we should “fix” the Electoral College when they lose a presidential election and “fix” the filibuster when they run the Senate and now “fix” the Supreme Court when they don’t run the Senate.

Regarding the Supreme Court, what does he recommend? Go into the voting booth assuming that at least one SCOTUS pick is going to be part of what you're choosing:

In any event, there is simple solution: voters should assume that every president will name at least one Supreme Court justice and vote accordingly. The last president who didn’t was Jimmy Carter, and the one before him was Andrew Johnson.

Bernard Hudson, a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, on the apparent denouement of the conflict in Yemen:

The deadly civil war in Yemen has reached a climax after three ugly years. No one can know for sure, but it looks like the coalition led by Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a major victory that could push the Iranian-backed rebels into an enduring cease-fire.

The legitimate Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, is poised to retake control of the vital port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s fourth-largest city and its principal port on the Red Sea. Yemen depends on imports to survive and Hodeidah is the port of entry for most outside goods. International aid groups worry a long-term siege there could disrupt the already-limited flow of medicine and food into the country. But the pain is worth the gain – especially for U.S. interests – because of Hodeidah’s strategic importance.

Jim Treacher at PJ Media on Seattle's new anti-drinking-straws ordinance:

If you're caught using one of the newly verboten drinking implements by Seattle's Straw Gestapo, and you don't have a note from your doctor, you will be fined $250. Hey, it's a small price to pay for protecting the planet, right?

What a liberal paradise Seattle is. You can smoke all the weed you want and the cops can't touch you, but you'll need to bring your own straw with you on the resulting Taco Bell run.

Remember how excited everybody got when Narenda Modi was first elected Prime Minister of India? He was going to usher in an era of free-market initiatives that would turbocharge India's economy. Sadanand Dhume at the American Enterprise Institute says that, as Indian politics heat up in the sunup to next year's elections, we're seeing his underperformance in stark relief. He also notes a deterioration in public discourse that may make you react along the lines of, "Oh, no, not there, too."


She's far from the first to take note of the phenomenon of the fading of civic organizations and what it's done to our social fabric - there was the book some years ago by sociologist Robert D. Putnam called Bowling Alone,  and a National Review piece by Slade O'Brien on the topic, to cite two examples, but today's Townhall piece by Salena Zito is an important contribution to the conversation.

It can be argued that NATO members need to step up their efforts to meet the 2 percent goal regarding their defense spending, but, as Andrew Malcolm at Hot Air explains, President Shoot-Off-His-Mouth's inflammatory letters to those countries' leaders is counterproductive, coming as it does before the Brussels summit:

Trump is underlining his unhappiness with NATO by having his first formal summit with Putin immediately after the NATO meeting.

Sowing divisions among NATO allies is a prime goal of Putin’s. Trump’s aggressive tactics fit that perfectly.

Few things would make Putin happier than to see reduced U.S. military forces based in Europe in a  strategic position to discourage or thwart Soviet, er, I mean, Russian military incursion of the invasive type Putin ordered in Georgia and annexing Crimea from Ukraine.

And now we come to the most important piece in this roundup: Jonah Goldberg's latest at NRO, entitled "Another Lazy 'Never Trump' Screed."  It's a takedown of a piece at The American Spectator by One America News Network White House correspondent Emerald Robinson. (Goldberg provides the link to that.)

I'm going to excerpt at length, given the importance of his points. There's this one, for instance. These Trump shills are shamelessly disingenuous in lumping all manner of disparate figures together based on their only common trait: finding Trump objectionable to one degree or another:

Her gloating, smarmy, gleeful thesis is that the Never Trumpers are dead or dying. She means this mostly figuratively but she does go out of her way to indulge in some unfortunate literalism in the case of Charles Krauthammer. (Going by the reactions on Twitter, apparently if you share her Trumpist exuberance, her celebratory tone doesn’t become distasteful when it comes to her discussion of Charles’s demise.) There is precious little “analysis” here, and most of it amounts to gloating assertions that the careers of people she labels “Never Trump” are in trouble.

She then goes on to explain why it happened, or at least claims to.

Now, before I go on, as much as I enjoy reading the musings of someone I’ve never heard of at a cable-news network I’ve never watched explain — in the pages of The American Spectator — the declining relevance of people at Fox, Bloomberg, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, I should make a general point. There is nothing new here. Pretty much every couple of weeks, someone writes another essay — usually timed to some real or perceived Trump triumph — about how the so-called Never Trumpers (almost always defined loosely, in bad faith, or not at all) have been consigned to the ash heap of history. Rarely has so much effort been exerted to prove irrelevance before. If Bill Kristol or Steve Hayes or David French or yours truly don’t matter anymore, why does our existence haunt these people so?

Then there’s the issue of whether it’s actually, you know, true.

Ms. Robinson writes:

Of course, Kristol was not alone in his contempt for Trump — he was only the most vocal and unhinged. Alongside him were other conservatives like Jennifer Rubin and George Will and Michael Gerson at the Washington Post; Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal; David Brooks and Ross Douthat at the New York Times; Jonah Goldberg and David French at National Review; Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg; and Erick Erickson at RedState. A number of others, people like David Frum and Ana Navarro, committed political seppuku early and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically.

First off, grouping all of these people together is lazy and dumb. You can’t compare the approach toward Trump of, say, Ramesh, David, and Erick to that of Jen Rubin or Ana Navarro. Or, I should say, you can’t if you’re a remotely informed or serious person. That’s the problem with nearly all of these “Never Trump” screeds: They use the term so promiscuously and selectively that it becomes little more than a straw man.

There's also Robinson's attempt to depict these people as being on the backside of their career trajectories:

Second, is it “needless to say” that the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically? If it were, she wouldn’t need to assert it absent any proof. Bret Stephens moved to the New York Times; is that really a marked demotion career-wise? Since Trump was elected, Steve Hayes has been promoted to editor of The Weekly Standard. That doesn’t sound like career freefall to me. I don’t know about everyone mentioned here, but most seem to be doing okay. I was certainly worried that my positions would hurt sales of new book Suicide of the West — and they probably did — but it still debuted at No. 5 on the NYT bestseller list. Oh, and my podcast is doing great. More broadly, National Review and The Weekly Standard are thriving.

In short, Robinson doesn’t know what she’s talking about. My suspicion is that because she and her network are trying to become state TV in the Trump era, she’s pandering to her audience by telling them what they want to hear. There’s a lot of that going around these days. She might also be confused, thinking that the audience she is pandering to is the only one that matters. While it’s true that the people who take this woman seriously do not like many of her targets, by this standard, Alex Jones can claim our careers are tanking too. 

Goldberg doesn't miss anything about her vacuousness. Her penchant for trite phraseology gets duly noted.

Her “analysis” is equally deficient in fact and seriousness. It conflates disparate people into a single easy-to-slander label and then dresses up the same tired clichés and lazy epithets (RINOS!!111!) that I’ve been reading in comment sections and ALL CAPS emails for nearly 25 years. All that’s missing is a really biting bon mot about Georgetown cocktail parties.

The ugly and shallow Kurt Schlichter likes the cocktail-party image, too.

And, like Schlichter, she employs the alpha-male tactic as well:

Then there’s the atmospherics. Robinson, like so much of this crowd, is obsessed with impugning the manhood of her targets as if “real men” see the world the way she does. When I hear this stuff from male writers and pundits, I assume they’re overcompensating for something. In this case I can only assume it’s just more pandering to readers who need to be reassured.

And then he examines this head-scratcher from Robinson - namely, the assertion that all and any pundits who find Trump objectionable to one degree or another don't care, often because they are agnostics or Jews:

Her one actual attempt at an analytical point is her claim that the “conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty because they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago.”

Goldberg dispatches it handily:

It’s . . . a lie. I’ve written often in defense of religious liberty (indeed, one of my recent columns on the subjected inspired a call from the vice president to thank me for it). Charles Krauthammer and George Will have defended religious liberty and religion generally for decades. Are we really to take someone seriously who would suggest that Erick Erickson, Ramesh Ponnuru, or, my Lord, David French don’t take religious liberty seriously? 

It's interesting, isn't it? Trump lives rent-free inside the heads of enraged hard leftists, and those of us who, while applauding the good moves, particularly judicial appointments and deregulation, find him ideologically unmoored and loathsome on a character level, live rent-free inside the heads of the Robinson and Schlichter types.

Meanwhile, we just proceed according to our principles. To the two groups above - progressives and populists, for shorthand - our continued existence is something they dare not acknowledge.

Wednesday roundup

In recent years, India's demonstrated willingness to be a US ally has been an encouraging development on the world stage - which makes its tolerance of the kinds of regimes besetting Iran and Venezuela so unnerving.

Italy's shaky economic situation could trigger a new global crisis, says The American Enterprise Institute's Desmond Lachman.

What's happening with Tommy Robinson in the UK will chill your bones:

On Friday, British free-speech activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson was acting as a responsible citizen journalist — reporting live on camera from outside a Leeds courtroom where several Muslims were being tried for child rape — when he was set upon by several police officers. In the space of the next few hours, a judge tried, convicted, and sentenced him to 13 months in jail — and also issued a gag order, demanding a total news blackout on the case in the British news media. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was immediately taken to Hull Prison.

Hull Prison, in Kingston upon Hull, England, where Tommy Robinson was taken to serve a 13-month prison sentence just hours after his arrest on Friday, May 25.

Most media outlets were remarkably compliant. News stories that had already been posted online after Robinson’s arrest at the Scottish Daily Record, Birmingham Live, The Mirror, RT, and Breitbart News were promptly pulled down, although, curiously, a report remained up at the Independent, a left-wing broadsheet that can be counted on to view Robinson as a hooligan. Indeed, the Independent’s article described Robinson as “far-right” and, in explaining what he was doing outside the courthouse, used scare quotes around the word “reporting”; it then summed up the least appealing episodes in his career and blamed him for an attack on the Finsbury Park Mosque last January. Somehow, the Independent also got away with publishing a report on London’s Saturday rally in support of Robinson.

Also on Saturday, Breitbart UK posted a copy of the gag order, but redacted it as required. The resulting document proved to be a perfect illustration of Western Europe’s encroaching tyranny.

Hamas has not relented in its current aggression against Israel:

On Tuesday, Hamas fired an enormous wave of mortars into Israel, striking an Israeli kindergarten but causing no injuries. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were forced to bunkers to weather the attack. That wave of mortars followed an attempt over the weekend by Islamic Jihad terrorists to cut through the Gaza border in order to murder Israelis in their beds; during the chase, terrorists fired at Israeli troops. One terrorist was killed, and another injured. The Israeli Defense Forces also announced that several days ago, Hamas attempted to fly a drone loaded with explosives over the border.

If you're looking for a bracing dose of thunderous moral clarity, check out "My 'Black Lives Matter' Problem" by Jason D. Hill at Commentary.  He demonstrates why BLM is wrong as wrong can be on crime, Israel and education. In the course of so demonstrating, he revisits some fundamental conservative principles and states them incisively.


Good things may be happening on the Very Stable Genius's watch, but let us remember that he's an extremely immature brat. How can we forget? He constantly reminds us with  tweets like this one about Bob Iger of ABC / Disney and the Roseanne situation, and this one saying he wishes he hadn't picked Jeff Sessions to be attorney general.

New Quinnipiac poll: Ted Cruz has an 11-point lead over Beto O'Rourke in the Senate race down in Texas.

Trudeau in India

Three good takes on the Canadian Prime Minister's visit.

Megan Fox at PJ Media asks how, say, Ivanka Trump would be received if she not only deplaned in, but tromped around the country in brightly colored faux-ceremonial getups and clasped her hands prayer-like for every photo op.

A member of Trudeau's entourage has caught the attention of David Krayden at The Daily Caller:

. . .  the presence of Jaspal Atwal on the trip continues to generate outrage from the Conservative opposition, international attention and excuses from the Liberal government.

Atwal, who was convicted of attempted murder while a member of a Sikh terrorst organization, accompanied Trudeau and his retinue on the official trip to India this week. Atwal had attended two receptions and was slated to dine with the Trudeau at the Canadian embassy in Delhi Thursday night before news of Atwal’s past hit Canadian and international media.

One of Trudeau’s Liberal Members of Parliament (MP) has proclaimed a mea culpa in the incident. Randeep Sarai issued a statement following the media firestorm: “I alone facilitated his request to attend this important event. I should have exercised better judgment, and I take full responsibility for my actions.”
Trudeau promised Friday that he would “having a conversation with that MP in Canada next week.”

However, the Prime Miniser’s office was also presenting another narrative for the diplomatic blunder Friday morning. In a background briefing,  a senior government official spoke, on the condition of anonymity to reporters, saying Atwal was invited because of “rogue elements” in the Indian government who view Canada with distrust because they believe the Trudeau government is sympathetic towards Sikh separatists.

The official opposition Conservatives are buying none of this, asking how a convicted terrorist and would-be assassin could not be spotted by a routine security check.

Ontario MP and foreign affairs critic Erin O’Toole told The Daily Caller that the incident is symptomatic of Trudeau’s diplomatic insouciance.

“This shows incredibly poor judgment by the prime minister and is a major setback to our relationship with  India and reputation around the world,” O’Toole said.

Mark Giller at The Resurgent reposts a number of reactions from Indians.

I guess this is the kind of thing to be expected from a guy who mansplains the use of the term "mankind" to a woman, admonishing her to instead use "peoplekind" in an irony-laden exchange earlier this month, who is adamantly and outspokenly pro-fetal murder, and who, upon Fidel Castro's death, called him a "remarkable leader." To be fair, he seems to understand the key role petroleum plays in human advancement, having approved two oil pipelines, but feels compelled to couch his support in terms of the kind of climate hooey that Europeans insist on hearing.

To return to the subject at hand, one wonders why he and his family didn't ditch the outfits when the social-media snickers started flooding in.

An busy day for the "international community"

Of course, there's DJT's current Europe visit. It's started off well. His Poland speech resolutely affirmed the value of the entire West, touching on threats to it, reassuring all that the US will abide by Article 5 of the NATO agreement, but most importantly putting the West's spiritual foundation front and center among the reasons for its essentiality to humankind. It was a refreshing and surprising departure from the "America first" rhetoric into which he so facilely lapses. It would be interesting to know who the chief speechwriter was.

Now it's on to Hamburg, and, to no one's surprise, the anticapitalist riots are already underway. The big question is whether Trump's economic message will be protectionist or more inclined toward a free-market view. If it's the former, it takes a bit of wind out of the rioters' sails, given that their bogeyman is "globalism", just as it is for the populists who comprise DJT's slavishly devoted base.

There's also sure to be a demonstration of consternation on the part of several G20 leaders about the US pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. Too bad. They'd be wise to pull out as well, and throw off the economic burden it imposes.

Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Modi has been in Israel. During his visit, the two countries signed agreements to deepen ties in such areas as defense, science, technology and agriculture. The Palestinian Authority feels snubbed, but given that Modi is clearly seeking economic partners dedicated to actual advancement, what do the Palis have to offer?

But back to Europe, all eyes are on the face-to-face meeting between Trump and Putin. For once, this might make for a useful application of DJT's squirm-inducing bluntness, given what Russia just did at the UN:

Russia on Thursday blocked a U.N. Security Council Resolution drafted by the U.S. that called for “significant measures” in response to North Korea’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The U.S. circulated the statement among the 15-member council after announcing plans for a new sanctions resolution against the nuclear-armed regime in North Korea. But an objection by Russia killed the statement, said a U.N. diplomat.

Russian officials argued that the missile launch Tuesday had not been verified as an intercontinental missile.

North Korea claimed it was an ICBM. The U.S. and U.N. also determined that Hwasong-14 missile launched by North Korea was of intercontinental range.

Mr. Trump and his administration have stepped up with tough rhetoric against the regime of dictator Kim Jong-un since the missile launch, which was North Korea’s first successful test of an ICBM.

Everybody understands the urgency of this situation - even Russia, despite its lone "assessment" that the missile was only intermediate-range, which goes to show just how cold the motives driving Russia's foreign policy are.

It's not like the Security Council was going to make a "heavy move," to empty a bit of Squirrel-Hair parlance, anyway. There would have been a new round of sanctions, but it would have had zero effect in terms of deterrence.

It seems that the grinning, chubby despot of a small parcel of northeast Asia, who never gets invited anywhere, has frozen the world's heavy hitters in their tracks.

Prediction: Events unfolding from those discussed above are going to be even more interesting.

Friday morning roundup

Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ on the two moments in FBI director James Comey's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday that prove he intended to pass on recommending indictment for Madam BleachBit. Who has been leaning on him, and what form has it been taking?

Just when you thought maybe the south Asian subcontinent was no longer a place of hair-raising tension, the following chain of events has occurred: an Indian military base in Kashmir was attacked, leaving 18 soldiers dead. India retaliated with "surgical strikes." And now the Pakistani defense minister is threatening India with nuclear destruction.

The Stupid Party's lack of a spine is nearly as big a factor in the flatlining of post-America as the machinations of the Freedom-Haters:

The big story of the new Continuing Resolution is of course that Congressional Republicans caving to President Obama and affirmatively funding Planned Parenthood.

But there's a lesser-known story that's almost as big of a Republican failure: in addition to failing to protect the unborn, they also failed to protect the Internet.

Michael Brendan Dougherty  at The Week coins a term that I think is quite useful: esoteric Trumpism. It's the notion that Squirrel-Hair is an emblem of something much bigger than himself, that he embodies some kind of supposed recognition that the ideological fault lines that characterized American - indeed, Western - political life are now obsolete. Dougherty takes four arguments one hears from esoteric Trumpists and shows them to be utter hooey.