Free Republic

Just how big is China? Plenty big. It's big enough to hold more than a billion human beings, and it has managed to keep workers employed, and to encourage them to save nearly half their annual income. China's performance in the 21st century is most impressive, with large official gains in imports and exports, and most significant numbers are up. The problem is that China keeps inventing its numbers. For decades, regional and local administrations have lied to the federal government about their performance. This tactic enables regional governments to reduce the taxes they pay to Peking, and also to...

Washington is awash with rumors of millions of Hong Kong residents moving to America. The Chinese are at our gates, eagerly rewriting the laws against civic disobedience within Hong Kong. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is supporting the people of Hong Kong who support democracy: U.S. State Secretary Mike Pompeo said on June 1 that the United States is worried that if Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam cancels the elections or postpones them “that there would be violence or something like that, which is just unfounded.” “The Hong Kongers have held successful elections for years and years, so we...

So far, two dictators have been toppled and have been replaced by interim governments (with a striking resemblance to the previous ones), and there is a civil war in Libya. There are demonstrations throughout the Middle East, and indeed throughout the world, driven by mass movements demanding greater freedom. But there are also many demonstrators who want more rigid governmental control, typically inspired by fundamentalist Islamic codes that would dramatically worsen the civil rights of women, members of other sects and faiths, and more liberal Muslims. It’s a fight, with enormous stakes for the people involved and for the...

George Papadopoulos A junior member of the Trump foreign policy advisory team in 2016, George Papadopoulos was approached by FBI agents in Chicago, where he lived with his mother after the election while waiting for what he hoped would be an offer to join the new administration. The agents said they just wanted to talk to him about contacts he’d made with people in London during the campaign. He spoke to them without a lawyer or the benefit of notes, emails or a calendar to refresh his recollection — a decision he would later regret. One of the interviews was...

Byron York seems baffled by the discovery in the Mueller report that the FBI was after General Michael Flynn long before the intercepts of his telephone conversations with Russian officials during the post-2016 election transition. By that time, Obama Administration higher-ups in the intelligence community were warning Trump that Flynn had suspicious intimate contacts with the Russians, possibly in violation of the Logan Act. As Byron writes: "Mueller strongly suggests something else was up. Obama administration intelligence officials "were surprised by Russia's decision not to retaliate in response to the sanctions," the report said. "When analyzing Russia's response, they became...

I am more and more coming around to the opinion of David Goldman and Michael Ledeen. The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor. It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies. General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others...

His name is Touraj Esmaeeli, and you haven’t heard it before. And yet, he’s a big story. He worked as a top advisor to the Iranian intelligence service, as an expert on that country’s cyberwar against the United States and other Western countries. Several of his colleagues have been arrested since last spring, accused of spying, but the spybust hasn’t been widely covered. Esmaeeli scooted off to Istanbul, where he first checked in to a hotel and then barely escaped a combination of Iranian and Turkish agents who had come to arrest him. He has taken refuge in a Western...

“The war is on,” General Mike Flynn wrote three years ago.  And he went on to describe it in our best-selling book The Field of Fight. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua.  We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, and countless other terror groups. It’s a world war, and the enemy alliance is composed of both radical Islamist groups and nations—above all, Iran and its proxies--and radical secular tyrannies, like Putin’s.  While we have defeated them...

The dramatic Tuesday hearing for former national security adviser Mike Flynn didn’t produce a sentence. Instead, Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Mr. Flynn a delay to reconsider his options. I was in the courtroom, and my reading of Judge Sullivan’s treatment of Mr. Flynn (with whom I co-wrote a 2016 book) was rather different from what most reporters have said and written. Judge Sullivan repeatedly invited Mr. Flynn to reconsider his guilty plea on a charge of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Judge Sullivan stressed that he had not presided over earlier proceedings in the case and that he...

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is scheduled to sentence General Mike Flynn on Tuesday morning, and there’s a lot at stake. To begin with, there’s the future of a fine man who transformed the way we do battlefield intelligence and the ensuing operations against our enemies in Iraq, where we won in large part because Flynn’s (and General Stan McChrystal’s) new tactics, and then in Afghanistan, again in tandem with McChrystal.

Frank Buckley is a real original, and his recent book, The Republican Workers Party, gives us plenty to ponder. He is a political maverick, rejecting labels and stereotypes, which delights me. The title comes from Trump’s speech to CPAC in 2017. Which Buckley characterizes this way: The Republican Workers Party would be libertarian in its opposition to crony capitalism but economically liberal when it comes to welfare policies for those truly in need. It would be a party of nationalists who reject a globalism that is indifferent between the welfare of Americans and of foreigners. It would be a jobs...

Victor Davis Hanson, as he so often does, gives us an excellent and concise bird’s-eye view of where we stand with the intelligence community: [T]hose who are warning of Russian collusion efforts to warp an election now work for agencies that in the recent past were doing precisely what they now rightly accuse the Russians of doing. The damage that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others have done to the reputations of the agencies they ran will live on well after their tenures are over. For once, I think he underestimates the duration and intensity of the rottenness. It isn’t just...

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had historian, Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, former Special Advisor to the Secretary of State and consultant to the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, author of 38 books and most pertinent to today, Iran expert, Michael Ledeen on the podcast to discuss among other things: The impending collapse of the Khomeinist regime and what the U.S. can do to accelerate it The false narrative about alternatives for Iran being either appeasement or war The history of U.S. intelligence failures in Iran How secular...

Is it a revolution? Can it succeed? Should we support it, and if so, how? Surely this tumult is very different from the protests of 2009. It’s different in at least two ways, geographical and demographical. Geographically, whereas the 2009 protests were mainly limited to Tehran, today’s phenomenon covers the whole country, from major cities to smaller towns and even rural villages. That’s significant, because those who do not believe in the prospects of an Iranian revolution invariably argue that opposition to the regime is restricted to the elites of the big cities, and that rural populations are pro-regime. It’s...

Washington (CNN) — Then-President Barack Obama warned President-elect Donald Trump in November against hiring retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his national security adviser, former Obama administration officials confirmed to CNN. Obama warned Trump about Flynn during their Oval Office meeting on November 10, days after Trump was elected president. Obama's concerns, which he relayed to Trump, were not related to the firing of Flynn from the Defense Intelligence Agency but rather in the course of the investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 election. "Flynn's name kept popping up," according to a senior Obama administration source.

The rent-a-crowds, which have a high proportion of military men, are not really prepared to directly challenge the United States. The marches, chants, and posters are not so much for our consumption as for that of their own citizens, most of whom are disgusted with the failed regime and yearn for a return to the Western world. The regime fears that, sooner or later, the tens of millions who detest Khamenei, Rouhani, et al., will flood the streets as they recently did on the occasion of the funeral of Hashemi Rafsanjani, chanting anti-regime and anti-Russian slogans. Today’s “festivities” are designed...

Roger Simon’s fine book on moral narcissism—I Know Best—provides the basic insight into the mostly silly “debate” about the Hillary vs Trump contest. Roger understands that our ruling class isn’t much interested in understanding the real consequences of policy. With rare exceptions, the debate is about how the American “nomenklatura” feels about advocating one policy or another. It’s all about them, not about the election. In twenty-first century America, almost all of us seem to have concluded that “You are what you say you are. You are what you proclaim your values to be, irrespective of their consequences.” That is...

As I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, Donald Trump is no fascist, but there are many pundits who are calling him that. Their efforts, I think, tells us more about their ignorance of fascism than about Trump and his followers. The latest to show off his ignorance is Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, writing in the Washington Post. Fascist movements, according to Kagan, are incoherent mobocracies with strong leaders. They had, he claims, “ no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. ‘National socialism’ was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by...

Saturday's Washington Post had an article which quotes the usual unnamed intelligence sources saying that they are surprised to discover that al Qaeda has "reconstituted" itself. This surprise derives from, inter alia, the computer data found recently in Pakistan, intelligence sources (both ours and friends'), and simply looking at the range of activities in which the terrorists engage. This surprise is, as usual, unsettling, since it has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since...

I know two quite different Mark Levins and I am crazy about both of them. The first is the one I listen to on the radio. The loud one, the one that gets all worked up, the one I imagine standing up and waving his arms, veins protruding from his neck, pupils dilated. The other one writes books, and those books are so calm, so carefully argued, and so patiently explicated, that you can only imagine him sitting in an overstuffed leather chair near a fireplace puffing thoughtfully on his calabash. The second Levin explains his mission this way in...