In this mailing: - Gwythian Prins: China and Iran: Join Up the Dots
- Amir Taheri: Biden and Putin in G7 and a Half
by Gwythian Prins • June 13, 2021 at 5:00 am Sheikh Jarrah, the ostensible cause of the latest conflict in the Middle East, is not so complicated. It is a private rent dispute, caused by squatters and by Palestinian tenants who acquired protected tenancies (not ownership) during the period of Jordanian occupation 1948-1967 when Jordan illegally sequestrated the property rights of Jewish landowners. The Palestinian tenants and squatters are refusing to pay their Israeli landlords rent for properties that have been in undisputed Jewish ownership since the middle of the 19th century.... The Ayatollahs have, since Iran's Revolution of 1979, like their proxies, vowed the total destruction of Israel... This goal is also inscribed in the charters of Hamas, Hezbollah and the current Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas.... This agreement between China and Iran strengthened the hands of both countries to test the resolve of a Biden administration filled with Obama era appointees committed to two of his signature foreign policy errors, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and a dogmatic prioritisation of the so-called "Two State Solution" that is now dead and buried. With people such as Hady Amr, now the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for "Israel-Palestine," who implausibly Biden sent to "mediate" what cannot be mediated, hope dies. Amr is parti pris: someone who once said that he was "inspired by the Palestinian intifada." He has in the past wrongly accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.... Obama's third signature error in foreign policy forms a bridge to the other set of dots to be joined up. Fifteen years ago the many small islands and reefs in the South China Sea which are now PLA bases with runways and ports, were uninhabited, many of them tidally submerged and marked with metal poles (which confer no territorial rights under UNCLOS - the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea). It was mainly on Obama's watch that this militarisation proceeded, unchallenged, when it could and should have been nipped in the bud... If the militarisation of the South China Sea is left intact, Communist China's navy -- The Peoples' Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) -- will soon have a second and secure southern approach to Taiwan for the invasion which it has threatened for so long.... Declaratory PLAN doctrine states that in the event of war it holds at risk US assets from Guam to the far side of Hokkaido: hence US bases in Japan. The PLA has also threatened missile attacks on Australia, where key Five Eyes intelligence assets are situated. PLA planners must be aware that these are red lines as much as an attempt to invade Taiwan. Any such actions would trigger US escalation, as recent speeches by senior USN officers have confirmed. It appears that the Communist Chinese are throwing down a gauntlet to test our resolve.... But Communist China is not ten feet tall. As the recent failure of the PRC space station suggests, we should not automatically assume technological omnipotence. In any event, equipment does not equal capability. We should also remember, as Sun Tzu's Art of War and the Thirty Six Stratagems of the Warring States/Three Kingdoms period both observe, that perception of power has a power of its own and that the most elegant defeat is the one incurred by the moral disarmament of the enemy.... Over recent months, the US Dept. of Defence has been engaged in a series of technical moves of significance...They have not been much remarked... but all can be found in the professional military literature, as they should be if they are to compose a credible deterrent to make Xi Jinping think again and stay his hand.... Iran...needs little encouragement to attack Israel, especially via its proxies where it can claim "plausible deniability". The current bout of violence and its sequel suit Xi Jinping's command group well as a "Dead Cat" tactic: a misdirection so that eyes are off the prime area of interest for the PRC. That area is....the recent illegal occupation of the South China Sea by this untraditional maritime power [and] the "continentalisation" of this sea-space..... In short Xi Jinping's command group must be aware that many windows are closing for it and that time is not on their side unless they can persuade the Free World to self-harm sufficiently that we disarm morally. For this, there is evidence of intent and, unfortunately, of current success.... Therefore the Free World must not fall for the Dead Cat gambit. We must firmly support Israel, the window of the west in the middle east, and we must maintain the Abraham Accords as the best road to normalisation in that region. If we ensure that we are all awake but not woke, we thereby can resist cultural subversion and moral disarmament through the PRC Ministry of State Security... 'make friends for China' strategy within our body politic. In these ways, the threat posed to us by the most patient, intelligent, malign and formidable enemy that we have faced, can be defeated.... By preference, a united front of firm deterrence and ostracism may cause the Mandate of Heaven to move from Xi Jinping's communist dictatorship, as it has from over-reaching Chinese leaders many times before.... We have a duty to the betrayed democrats of Hong Kong and by extension to all decent Chinese people to help them to liberate themselves. But for twenty years we have averted our eyes and so the hour in now late. Many in the Western establishments who were defeatist or complicit have much to answer for. Therefore, to prevail the Free World may have to use force if needs be; and if force must be used, then sooner is safer than later.
 The Free World seems finally to be waking up to the fact that for at least a decade we have been in 'grey war' with the new alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea (CRINK) without openly realising it. Pictured: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (left) and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the signing ceremony for Iran and China's "25-year strategic cooperation pact," on March 27, 2021 in Tehran. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images) The Free World seems finally to be waking up to the fact that for at least a decade we have been in 'grey war' with the new alliance of China, Russia, Iran and N. Korea (CRINK) without openly realising it. Within high circles in the Western Intelligence Community (which is awake, not woke, thankfully) there is a name for it: ghost attack. Ghost attack is described thus in two stages: Stage One: "Commit non-attributable, or feasibly deniable, acts of war that advance your own national power and physically harm your adversaries, but do not fit traditional legal standards to mobilize them to a formal response." Stage Two: "Then foment chaos, advance the narrative of your innocence, and underline your adversary's incompetence through information warfare." Continue Reading Article by Amir Taheri • June 13, 2021 at 4:00 am [Putin] wants a return to the good or bad old days, when the USSR and the United States were regarded as arbiters of world affairs on an equal footing. Today, thanks to the Obama era, that vast region [Central Asia] is morphing into a race course between China and Russia, with the US as a distant observer. The summit with Biden would be an opportunity for Putin to impose a number of "events" as faits-accomplis, notably the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Putin has exploited Obama's numerous mistakes in the Middle East. He has built bridgeheads to a number of countries that were once in the Soviet orbit, notably Egypt and Iraq, while casting itself as the arbiter of Syria's fate. Using the Islamic Republic in Iran as his Trojan horse, Putin is also gaining a foothold in Lebanon. What Putin wants from Biden with regard to Iran is the lifting of sanctions against Iran.... With sanctions lifted, Russia could gain control of Iran's immense energy resources. That would enable Russia to control Iran's market share, thus heightening its own profile as the key source of supply for Europe and, in time, for China. In exchange, Iran would be helped to secure enough money to keep the regime in place.... Putin also hopes that Iran will quickly ratify the so-called Caspian Convention, which would turn the world's largest lake into a Russia pond and shut Western powers out. By excluding itself from Afghanistan, the US leaves the field open for new players in the latest version of the "Great Game". China, using Pakistan as its local "fixer", is already courting the Taliban as Islamabad's surrogate to rule Afghanistan. For its part, Russia is developing an axis with India and Iran to counter the Beijing-Islamabad duo. Here, too, the US will be distant spectator. Putin will cast several skillfully baited hooks for Biden. He would talk of stabilizing Europe, containing China, keeping the North Koreans within the red lines, not allowing the mad mullahs of Tehran to go beyond certain limits in their pretended "Jihad" against Israel, and preventing the Taliban from seizing control of Afghanistan and undoing all that has been done with blood and money from the US and its Afghan and Western allies. The question that Biden needs to ponder is this: Is Putin turning Russia into a mere competitor for power and prestige for the US or is he, as some of his barely concealed misdeeds indicate, an enemy of the democratic world, formerly known as "The Free World"?
 (Photo by Angela Weiss and Alexey Druzhinin/AFP via Getty Images) By holding a tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin just after the G7 summit in Cornwall, US President Joe Biden may signal a move towards a G7 and a half arrangement in which Russia, once a full member of the club, secures a side chair in its ante-chamber. The arrangement suits Putin just fine. For his strategy has always aimed at taking the Western democracies one by one and not as a bloc such as NATO, the European Union or the G7. But what does Putin want? In one sense he wants a return to the good or bad old days, when the USSR and the United States were regarded as arbiters of world affairs on an equal footing. Continue Reading Article |
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