Free Republic

China’s leader Xi Jinping will meet President Biden Nov. 15 in San Francisco with four high cards in his hand. Policy advisers close to Xi express an unprecedented kind of confidence in China’s strategic position. First, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces and its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” is a setback for America’s strategic position and a gain for China, which has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Second, the US tech war on China has flopped, as Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of...

A gloomy assessment of Ukraine’s prospects for victory against Russia emerged from a recent private gathering of former top US soldiers, intelligence officials and scholars with resumes reaching from the Reagan to the Trump administrations. Short of trained personnel and ammunition, one speaker argued, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky might consider a Chinese peace plan, especially after Beijing’s successful mediation of the Iran-Saudi dispute. The several dozen attendees, many of whom had held cabinet or sub-cabinet positions, met under Chatham House rules, which forbid identification of individual participants but allow the content itself to be presented. Overwhelmingly, the sentiment of participants...

US stock prices and President Biden’s approval rating continued to tank, as inflation swamped household income. Only 39% of Americans approve of Biden’s performance, and just 33% of Democrats think the country is heading in the right direction. That’s no surprise, given the nearly 40% collapse of retailers’ stock prices this year. The S&P 500 is teetering on the edge of a bear market – that is, a peak-to-trough decline of 20% or more. The Biden stimulus – compounding the errors of the Trump Administration – amounted to a Ponzi scheme that threw $6 trillion of spending power at US...

If the end of the world came, but nobody told you about it, would you care? Here’s a stunning piece of information that appeared in exactly no American news media, right, left or center. I read about it in Global Times, the Chinese government’s English-language newspaper.The Pew Research Institute, a respected non-partisan opinion research organization, polled the world’s major countries about American democracy. Only 17% said the U.S. “is a good example for other countries to follow,” while 57% said it used to be. Twenty-three percent said it never was.It’s troubling that Americans have similar views. Only 19% of Americans...

NEW YORK – “This is manifestly not Saigon,” said United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken as helicopters snatched fleeing Americans from the embassy roof in Kabul. It’s incomparably worse for America’s world standing. Like the fellow in the Sam Cooke song, Blinken doesn’t know much about history or geography. Unlike the man in the song, he doesn’t know that one and one is two, by which I mean Russia and China. Richard Nixon opened diplomatic relations with China three years before the fall of South Vietnam, securing China’s tacit agreement not to exploit the Communist victory by exporting the...

(Note: David Goldman AKA Spengler) American equity investors cut and run in response to an action by the People’s Bank of China. NEW YORK – A 3% plunge in the S&P 500 isn’t frequent. We have had just 24 trading days this bad during the past seven years. It’s noteworthy that it occurred on a day when the US Federal Reserve took pains to declare that it would support the market with security purchases for the indefinite future, and on which no important data was released. Greed overwhelmed fear, moreover, in parts of the market; market professionals watched drop-jawed as...

In all the perfervid reporting this week (Victor Davis Hanson calls this “concocted melodramas”) there are only three big stories to my mind: The President’s stunning success in the Middle East, Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos’ brilliant parlay to Princeton’s virtue-signaling president and the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each of these are likely to further tip Trump toward an election victory in which according to Rasmussen he’s already reached 53% approval among likely voters.No one has better described the significance of the Abraham Accord than Spengler (David Goldman). The President, defying the conventional wisdom of decades of...

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon was arrested for alleged fraud in connection with a border wall-building campaign. The estimable Andrew McCarthy reviews the indictment in National Review and comments, “The wire-fraud and money-laundering charges were a long time coming, and the postal inspectors appear to have meticulously traced the proceeds through numerous bank accounts, real-estate parcels, and at least one vehicle. These are itemized in the indictment’s forfeiture allegations, which are in addition to the significant imprisonment and staggering fines that could result in the event of convictions.” Here’s my commentary from Asia Times: In August 2017, I was...

US President Donald Trump’s decision to humiliate Iran with the assassination of a national hero on Jan. 2 is a calculated gamble and probably represents the best of a set of bad alternatives.Trump inherited a weak hand after the George W. Bush Administration destroyed the century-old balance of power between Sunni and Shia in Western Asia, by replacing Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority regime with a sectarian Shia government allied to Iran. Bush’s belief in majority rule and nation-building, lauded by his neoconservative advisers, handed Iran an opportunity to dominate the region. Trump pushed back with economic sanctions, which have not...

Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave. Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave. Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

President Trump offended the entire political spectrum with a tweet this morning blaming the U.S. for poor relations with Russia. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” the president said, and he is entirely correct. By this I do not mean to say that Russia is a beneficent actor in world affairs or that President Putin is an admirable world leader. Nonetheless, the president displayed both perspicacity and political courage when he pointed the finger at the United States for mismanaging the relationship with Russia. Full disclosure: I was a...

President Trump was good to his word, dumping the rotten Iran deal in the toughest possible way. First, he stated in so many words that the United States wanted regime change, not just a revised deal with the mullahs. Second, he warned that any nation assisting Iran's nuclear program also would face sanctions (it's not clear what would trigger such sanctions, which is going to worry the Europeans). Third, he showed contempt for European diplomacy by hailing Israel's acquisition of Iranian nuclear-weapons plans, something that the Europeans insisted had no bearing on the present deal.You don't get tougher than...

Before we wax too eloquent about the democratic aspirations of the great Iranian people, we should keep in the mind that the most probable scenario for Iran under any likely regime is a sickening spiral into poverty and depopulation. Iran has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world, indeed, the fast-aging population of any country in history. It has the highest rate of venereal disease infection and the highest rate of infertility of any country in the world. It has a youth unemployment rate of 35% (adjusted for warehousing young people in state-run diploma mills). And worst of...

After less than a year in office, President Donald J. Trump has exceeded the expectations of his supporters and confounded his enemies. Economic growth is accelerating, stock prices are rising, and consumer confidence is soaring. The only distressed asset in the US market is conventional wisdom, which dismissed the former real-estate developer and reality TV star as a blundering amateur. On the contrary, Trump evinces a shrewdness about American voters better than that of any politician of his generation. Even more importantly, he has the nerve to take risks in order to draw his opponents into battles that he thinks...

Malta EU Africa Migration Summit According to reports in the Israeli press, several other countries will follow President Trump's lead and move their Israeli embassies to Jerusalem. Who is doing this and why speaks volumes about the moral condition of the world. Hungary's President Viktor Orban reportedly vetoed a European Community resolution condemning Trump's action, and Hungary is expected to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Orban has fought a public war of words with liberal mega-donor George Soros all year, and polite opinion claims that Orban is an anti-Semite. His political base includes plenty of anti-Semites, to be sure....

The Internet is crawling with loonie stories alleging that liberal funder George Soros is a frontman for the Rothschild banking family, in the service of a conspiracy for world government. In the 19th century, to be sure, the Rothschild bank exercised enormous power at the peak of British and French financial influence. Today the Rothschild bank in London is a boutique with annual profits of about $70 million, a rounding error in the accounts of a J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Never you mind, respond the paranoids: the Rothschilds are a hidden octopus, and the fact that we...

We spent a great deal of time talking about inequality of opportunity and outcomes. The tech industry is fanatically progressive in its opinions, as the unfortunate James Damore, formerly of Google, recently learned. The tech industry's drivel about diversity and equality masks a guilty conscience: Digital technology creates inequality of a kind we have never seen before in human history. Instead of talking about inequality of outcomes, suppose we talked about inequality of knowledge? Three hundred years ago, pretty much everyone knew how their technology worked. Europe had lived for a millennium on the innovations of the Carolingian Renaissance: the...

President Trump's overall approval rating may have fallen, but there's one issue on which he has the support of 60% of the American public. That's the proposed travel ban from certain Muslim-majority countries, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll earlier this month. In fact, Trump has enjoyed the support of a plurality of all voters, Democratic as well as Republican, since he first proposed a travel ban in December 2015. Trump's boldness horrified the Establishment but probably won him the nomination; three-quarters of Republican voters in the key South Carolina primary backed the travel ban. The whole Republican leadership abhorred...

The US President is the first Western leader to stand up and announce that the whole sick business of terrorism has to stop. He means it. ___ When three knife-wielding Muslims charged into the Black and Blue Steakhouse near London Bridge on the night of June 3, they had the bad luck to encounter Mr. Roy Larner, who shouted, “F**k you, I’m Millwall,” referring to the South London football club supported by England’s most notorious hooligans. Mr. Larner fought them off with his fists and doubtless saved many lives. Millwall’s chant is, “No-one likes us. We don’t care.” President Trump...