China’s Mounting Censorship: How Much Should We Care?

Uncensored fount of creativity - inventiveness - unorthodoxy

 Hacking into Google email account servers. Intimidating blogsters. Erecting filter walls to block website access and remove words from search engines.  Interfering with text-messaging, “You-Tubing,” “Twittering” and “Facebooking” transmissions. All this and much more testify to China’s authoritarian government’s increasing determination to censor its citizens’ access to information and ideas.

How much should we care? It should bother us, of course. But certainly not enough to influence our policy on China. That  must remain focused sharply and narrowly on issues that protect and advance America’s interests.  Rather, we should view China’s censorship offensive as a strong reminder, at a time when it’s increasingly common to hear dire warnings that this will be “China’s Century,” how far China yet has to go to sustain its stunning economic growth.  Censorship, while possibly ensuring China’s rulers’ a bit longer control over their people, will impose huge penalties on China’s development, retarding China’s emergence as a true economic (and thus, political) superpower.  

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Brown’s Senate Win: New Life for the GOP?

Scott Brown Campaigning. A Specter of November 2.

Massachusetts’ new U.S. Senator Scott Brown has landed in Washington swathed in well-deserved mantle of triumph. His win is doubtless a huge personal political achievement. An even bigger winner is America, demonstrating again that its fractured, disjointed, decentralized and messy political process renders, when provoked, sharp, decisive, quick verdicts. Winning big also, of course, is the GOP, giving it renewed life if it draws the lesson that big-tent, inclusive Republican candidates can win even in heavily Democrat constituencies.

The big loser, obvious from its reeling disarray since election night, are the Democrats, on Capitol Hill and in the White House. At first glance, it’s hard to fathom why they should be in such pain. After all, just one Senate seat switched hands, leaving them with a still whopping Senate majority of 59-41 (the biggest for any party in more than three decades, though far short of the legendary 76 seats they held after Franklin Roosevelt’s second term sweep in 1936) and an even more whopping House majority of 256 to 178 (biggest since 1993). How then can the loss of this single Senate seat plunge Democrats into such introspective despair? 

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Obama & Foreign Affairs: So Much Sniping

Dealing with the world in a way that gives Americans reasons to be pleased.

So much sniping at Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs.  Such low grades for his foreign policy.  By reading op-eds and blogs, by listening to some radio and TV commentary, one would think that we’ve lapsed back to the dark dismal days of Jimmy Carter when, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s biting words, America was walking around with a “kick me” sign on its back.  That, we’re clearly not now doing. Obama’s foreign policy performance, on whole, isn’t bad at all.  For the first year of a presidency, with much still unfolding, with an actual “policy” still not in shape, it’s actually been pretty good. All too easy is it to forget how severely Ronald Reagan was criticized for not being bold enough in his first year – for not sufficiently backing Poland’s Solidarity Movement, for example, or for moving too timidly to reverse Communist gains in Central America.  It’s just as easy to forget how catastrophic was John Kennedy’s first year – bungling the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, watching passively as a wall split Berlin, withering in his Vienna encounter with the Soviet’s blustery Nikita Khrushchev.

Why, then, such criticism of Obama’s handling of our affairs on the world’s stage?  The only possible answer: It’s simply political partisan sniping, aimed at wounding a Democrat president.  Read more

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The Christmas Terrorist: A Wake-Up Call

The terrorist’s fumbled Christmas attempt to blow up the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane certainly has been a homeland security wake-up call. But to what is this call awakening us?  To be sure, we’ve been startled into recognizing that we must deploy more – or different – measures to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks.  But we also should be awakened to the effectiveness of security measures since September 2001. Most important, we should be waking-up to the reality that there’s nothing we can do to shield ourselves 100 percent and that by trying to do so, we unacceptably may erode our freedoms and liberty.

Perhaps we expect our President to demand, as Barack Obama did Wednesday, that we must erect a security system that will “save innocent lives — not just most of the time, but all the time.” Yet the tough reality is that any attempt to create an impervious shield either will fail or will impose what should be unacceptable burdens on our lives, freedoms and living standards.  In the eternal tensions and trade-offs between security and liberty, America’s tilt always should be to liberty. 

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Climate Change: “Thank you, China & India”

Deserving our thanks. India Prime Minister Singh (left) & China Prime Minister Wen

Whew. The much-ballyhooed Copenhagen Conference on climate change is now over. The verdict is in: The conference was a flop. Meaning: We Americans dodged a bullet. For that we must say, “Thank you China. Thank you India.” These two fast developing nations dug in their heels, refusing to be stampeded by the Europeans and the Obama Administration into signing onto an agreement imposing huge restraints on their economic growth and massive intrusions into their sovereignty. Sad to say, the U.S. delegation, headed by our President himself, apparently cared little about how much an agreement would reduce American living standards, would cost taxpayers and would allow other nations to meddle in our affairs. We were ready to sign and, indeed, actually had become breathless cheerleaders of almost any kind of agreement. But China and India, concerned mainly (and rightly) about their own well-beings, saved us from ourselves. So, again, “Thanks Beijing, thanks Delhi.” Read more

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Holocaust Deniers & the Economy

“The economic crisis was phony.”
“The dangers to the economy were grossly exaggerated.”
“We over-panicked.”
“The government should have done nothing.”
“There was a conspiracy by Washington to save Wall Street fat cats.”

Such refrains are sung by a growing chorus which denies that America and the global economy were facing tsunami-scale dangers in September 2008 that only drastic, sweeping and unprecedented actions could prevent. Clearly, it is not only the Nazi’s widely-documented campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews that can be denied by those ignoring just about every available solid fact, it is also something as current as the economic crisis of 2008, whose aftershocks we’re still painfully feeling. Read more

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Afghanistan: If We Fight, We Should Pay

Heading for Afghanistan. Are we prepared to win?

Barack Obama has made his case for sending 30,000 more American fighters to Afghanistan. His proposal is contentious. Some critics say that 30,000 are not quite enough, others that they are too much. Who’s right? It’s a close call. Surely, if we up our ante in Afghanistan, we should do so only if we are prepared to win – meaning, as Obama powerfully said in his West Point speech to the nation early this week, we must deny al Qaeda an Afghan (and Pakistani) haven from which to scheme attacks on us. If 30,000 will prove not enough to do that, will we then be willing to up our ante further? Whatever damage we may do to our international credibility and to our relations with Pakistan by pulling out of Afghanistan now, we will do to an even greater degree by leaving the job unfinished (to use Obama’s words) and pulling out later. Therefore: Are we in Afghanistan to win? That is the most critical – in fact, the only – question. If victory is not our goal, then we certainly should not send more troops.

Only the American people can answer this question.. If they are not ready to do what it takes to win in Afghanistan, then clearly we should not get in any deeper and, in fact, should start withdrawing and focus on fighting al Qaeda elsewhere. How do we determine whether Americans really back this war? We ask them to pay for it. We tax them for the added troops. Read more

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The 21st Century Takes Shape: U.S. China. India.

Obama greeting India's Singh. More than a fortuitous coincidence.

Neither Henry Kissinger nor Prince Metternich could have written a better script. In just a brief ten days, America deftly demonstrated how it plans to remain the globe’s most powerful strategic player well through the 21st Century. In these ten days, an American president, first touching down in Shanghai and Beijing, solidified U.S. relations with China, the world’s most populous country and soon-to-be #2 economic power, and then, back in Washington barely 100 hours, lavishly and effusively welcomed the leader of India, on track to exceed China in population by mid-century and on-track too to become the world’s #3 economic power. For both China and India, the U.S. has become the most important relationship – and, significantly, vice versa.

Whether Barack Obama’s China/India meetings were deliberately planned to be breathtakingly back-to-back or whether the scheduling merely was fortuitous coincidence, the result is the same: A subtle diplomatic master-move showing how Washington, in the decades ahead, if it is smart, sensitive and perceptive, can use its unique relations with each Asian giant to keep America at the center of global power and, as critical, to keep unavoidable U.S.-China, U.S.-India, China-India differences and rivalries from degenerating into conflicts. Read more

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Obama in China: An Unwise Rush to Judgment

Obama & China Pres. Hu Jintao in Beijing. A relationship shaping the 21st Century.

Barack Obama, with great fanfare, went to China. And he brought back what? At first glance, not much. There was no breakthrough, as critics correctly have noted; there was nothing dramatic. To focus on that, however, is unwisely to rush to judgment. What the critics (and most of the press coverage) do not note is that there was no likelihood of breakthroughs or of dramas. And there is no need for them. U.S.–China relations have moved far beyond the days of the pioneering Nixon/Kissinger visits into uncharted territory, which sought to find and forge underpinnings of an American relationship with China. Read more

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Berlin Wall’s Fall – The Missing Parade

Reagan at the Berlin Wall, 1987. "Tear down the Wall. Open the gates."

It was gratifying – and moving – watching Germany and Europe commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Yet something important was missing from all those ceremonies, heads of state meetings, exhibitions, concerts and extensive media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. Where was the parade for America? Where was the tribute to those American troops (about 10 million of them, in aggregate) and to those American leaders who guarded West Germany and West Berlin for four tense and dangerous decades? Where were the honors for the American people who patiently, generously and unfailingly backed a policy putting their sons and husbands in harm’s way on a distant and often little-understood battlefield? Where was the parade proclaiming Germany’s and Europe’s thanks to America?

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