China is preparing for war, so America needs to do the same.

Dan Gelernter warns at American Greatness:

We should prepare for war. Churchill called preparation for war “the sole guarantee of peace”. Instead, Biden touts maternity flight suits. We indulge in ludicrous fantasies of a “fair” military based on the premise that real wars don’t happen anymore. What message does that send enemies who plan to use their armies for actual fighting?

We are headed to war again. We are pointed at war right now. America’s weakness will bring us there. The hour is already late—we have allowed the Chinese navy to grow larger than our own.

But there is still time. We can strengthen ourselves. We can confront Russian and Chinese encroachments on international rights and territories now. Or we can immolate and destroy another generation, as a sacrifice to our own self-serving short-sightedness.

Or we can put President Trump back in the White House.

Christopher Roach warns even more strongly – also at American Greatness:

China is not our friend. Since the Clinton Administration, and through the Bush and Obama years, American policy proceeded as if trade and cultural ties would work automatically to liberalize the Chinese. Instead, these ties have enriched and strengthened China, allowing it to build first-class infrastructure, a robust economy, and a substantially more capable military in a mere 30 years’ time.

Simultaneously, these policies have hollowed out our own industrial base, rendering most of our industries, including the tech sector, dependent on Chinese inputs. In the name of efficiency, we have lost resilience, jobs, and independence.

The prospect of a military confrontation with China is now closer than it was at the beginning of this process. Along with its rising confidence and capability, China has advanced a self-serving and novel view of its authority, asserting sovereignty and rights of exclusion deep into the South China Sea.

The United States, for over 100 years, has viewed itself as a maritime power, enforcing freedom of navigation so that the world may benefit from trade and secure sea lanes. China’s expansive view of its rights threatens these expectations and sows the seeds of a potential military conflict.

Just as trade wars can become real ones, conventional military victories threaten to escalate into nuclear wars, not out of ruthlessness, but out of fear and confusion about an adversary’s intent.

In dealing with China, America would do well to ensure no conflict with China goes nuclear. There seems no reliable way to guarantee this under the conditions of conventional war. Under these circumstances, the United States should reconceive its regional objectives to avoid such conflict altogether.

One way of avoiding such conflict is to continue the focus on economic matters. Ideally, this would mean continuing the Trump-era policy of disconnecting our fortunes from China as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration’s watchword appears to be reversing every Trump policy reflexively.

Alexander, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, Trump.

There he stands among his peers – people who personally redirected the course of history. No matter what he does from now on for as long as he lives, he has already earned his position among the greatest leaders of our common Western past.

Matthew Boose, writing at American Greatness, seems to go even further in his admiration of Donald Trump, suggesting that he may be uniquely great, at least in American history:

There’s a reason that Trump commands a fierce devotion … He is an historic phenomenon, a singular personality the likes of which we have never seen, and are unlikely to see recur, in our lifetimes. 

Trump has done what few men can say of themselves: he altered the course of events in a way that no one saw coming. Totally by surprise, he presented an opportunity to save a nation in decline, an opportunity which, if lost, … may never return. That is what has made these four years so momentous, so eventful, and so full of conflict. Trump’s enemies sensed it too, which is why they have worked so desperately to crush him.

Few men could have withstood the extreme pressures that Trump has faced these four years. Millions of Americans have been inspired by his incredible tenacity through it all.

America does not produce many great men anymore, but Trump is a great man: he has an unusual degree of courage and willpower, qualities rare in our time in any measure. …

Trump and his supporters understand that the opposition is vicious, evil, and totally without honor, and that future leaders who want to defend America in more than name would have to be willing and able to incur enormous hostility and personal risk. …

“Trumpism” is a vague thing, and the Republican establishment and the kept Right are eager to jettison Trump and leave us with an ersatz version of his movement. Trump’s primary achievement … is that he made the Republican Party the home of a multi-racial working class. [Which is true but] this elides an essential part of Trump’s rise, which was that he acknowledged American whites who had felt put upon and alienated in an increasingly hostile regime. Any “Trumpism” that lacks the courage to push back against the relentless, anti-white sentiment of the Left is counterfeit.

Trump’s movement is a genuine revolution. Like any revolution, it is liable to corruption and change. This has happened with many movements before: the momentum gets lost, and it turns into a husk of its former self. … It is possible that Trump’s movement dies with him. History does not always [or ever? – ed] offer second chances. …

If Trump’s downfall really is a fait accompli, then millions of Americans will take his loss like a deathblow to America. If that is cultism, count me in. We are lucky to have Trump. He is an American hero, the best—the only—real defender we have had in generations.

Can Trumpism survive without Trump?

Can America survive without Trumpism?

That a serious and excellent historian should even be considering whether President Trump will qualify to stand among the greatest of the great leaders of history, is a tribute to him that could most satisfactorily rile the Democrats if they were to hear of it.

Victor Davis Hanson is the historian who reflects on President Trump’s ambition for America and how leaders who had similar aims in the past succeeded and failed.

He writes at American Greatness to answer his own question, ”Does ‘make X great again’ ever happen in history?”

The short answer: Sometimes.

Here’s one example. By 527 A.D., the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople seemed fated to collapse like the West had a near century prior. The Persian Sassanids were gobbling up Byzantine lands in the east. Almost all of old Rome west of Greece had already been lost.

A growing and unsustainable administrative state exercised near control of Constantinople. Christianity was splintering into irrelevant factionalism. The law was a selective mess.

Justinian was certainly an unlikely emperor: an outsider of peasant stock from the northern frontier, an Eastern Latin rather than Greek speaker (and likely the last native Latin-speaking emperor), who would marry an infamous but shrewd courtesan, Theodora.

Yet in some 38 years of sometimes brutal rule, Justinian through the leadership of his brilliant generals, Belisarius and Narses, stabilized the eastern borders. He reclaimed for eastern Rome North Africa, Sicily, much of Italy, and some of Spain, often through small, well-organized armies and prudent alliances. He reformed the bureaucracy, systematized Roman law (Codex Justinianus), and built the magnificent Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia — the largest church in the world for a thousand years.

Justinian might have done even far more had not a devastating three-year epidemic of bubonic plague spiked and wiped out a quarter of the empire’s population. The millions of losses created a permanent manpower shortage that left the Byzantines vulnerable to relentless Gothic enemies in Western Europe — and ultimately, a century and a half later, the conquests of new Islamic armies in the Middle East and North Africa.

Because from the get-go, Islam has been a religion of war, as it is now. 

The outsider Justinian’s agendas were those of many past reformers and restorers: apply the law equally and rationally, control government finances, restore the value of the currency, unite and inspire the population with iconic buildings and new infrastructure, reform and enhance religious practice [hmm], and offer predictable and steady rule.

History is replete with leaders who wish to perpetuate the status quo and to manage supposed permanent decline, but less frequently witnesses a few successful “great again” reformers of various stripes and agendas, both elected and the more ruthless (e.g., Pericles, Alexander, Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne, Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, Joseph II, Lincoln, Churchill).

In our own time, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are the most notable restorers. Both came into power at a time when the English-speaking West was considered near spent.

A much talked about “crisis of confidence” and “malaise” had led to general British and American depression about the costs of containing global communism. No one seemed to know what to do about the economy — given stubborn stagflation, low growth, high unemployment and inflation, and a rising “misery” index.

Oil shortages and rising prices were proof of “peak” oil in a dependent West — and permanent reliance on corrupt Middle-East petrodollar kingdoms. Radical Islam and Middle East terrorism were on the rise. 

They were the same thing.

But then so were ascendant “Tiger” economies in Asia that seemed in perpetuity would make cars, steel and just plain stuff better and cheaper than in Detroit or Manchester.

The cultural residue of the Sixties made any call for reformation and renewal seem quaint and hokey.

The late Sixties of the last century being when the New Left began its “long march through the institutions”; which succeeded in the twenty-first century in the almost total takeover of education in the West, and culminated in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. These were the Cold War victories of communism.

The United States would no doubt follow Britain’s postwar trajectory.

Downwards.

Declinism — supposedly due to moral nihilism, debt, spiritual emptiness, permanent energy shortages, Cold War militarism, laziness, statism, corruption — was thematic in think tanks and current in-the-know books. …

By “spiritual emptiness” was meant a desertion from the Christian churches. Of course, we see that as one good trend among all those undeniable evils.

After the end of the roaring 1960s and late 1970s, both Thatcher and Reagan were written off as near kooks, advocating strong defense, renewed nationalism, optimism, traditionalism, limited government, lower taxes, smaller government, and free-market deregulation — as pathways to a new muscular Britain and renewed superpower United States.

The results of their revolutions were the collapse of global communism …

That is to say, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe. As pointed out above, the ideology of communism was not defeated but steadily on its way to its greatest triumphs. But much was restored through the political victories of Reagan and Thatcher. Much was made greater.

…  the eventual restoration of Anglo-American international finance, recalibrated American entrepreneurism, and energy renaissances. Certainly the United States today in terms of technology, defense, agriculture, fossil fuel production, and higher education towers over its competitors in ways that would have seemed impossible in the 1970s.

Higher education? Well yes, in the sciences and technology. In innovation. Despite the ever more arrogant imposition of Leftist orthodoxy in the academies.

The idea of a Trump economic restoration in 2015-2016 seemed equally absurd. Larry Summers had assured us that annualized 3 percent GDP growth was the stuff of “fantasies.” He predicted instead a recession at 18 months of the Trump term, while Paul Krugman insisted on a market collapse in early 2017 with dubious chances of recovery.

We could never “drill our way out” of an energy crisis—so Obama had insisted and wrote off the very idea of a manufacturing rebound as some myth requiring a “magic wand”. Massive illegal immigration was a permanent fact of life, as was the new demography and identity politics. We were apparently to live with the Iran Deal and though not spoken, an eventual nuclear Iran. Nuclear missiles pointed at the West Coast from North Korea required “strategic patience.”

“Lead from behind” …

Surely the most absurd of Obama’s many absurd formulations!

… diplomacy relied on an international consensus of the sort illustrated by the Paris Accord and permanent refugee status of the Palestinians — as well as avoidance of disruptive moves likes leveraging NATO partners to meet their promised contributions, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, considering taboo tariffs to trim China’s huge surpluses and its assumption that its ascendance to global hegemony was a matter of when, not if.

Trump had lots of assets and advantages in seeking to restore U.S. power and prosperity. American research universities dominate global education. American frackers had produced more natural gas and oil than ever thought possible. Agriculture had never been more productive, and the United States had unused leverage and economic clout to recalibrate trade deals and alliances in a more symmetrical fashion.

The dilemma of Trump’s restoration was similar to that of many radical reformers: being an abject outsider meant he was beholden to few insiders and was largely immune from stifling and ossifying establishment groupthink. Yet his pariah status also ensured little inside help, lots of status quo deep state venom, and a learning curve required to rein in the chariot of a huge and dangerous bureaucracy.

No one knows how this latest historical effort to make great again a perceived ailing state will play out. On the plus side, Trump has sought to restore traditional jurisprudence through impressive judicial nominations. He has praised rather than lectured business and helped to free the animal spirits of capitalism. Trump cut rather than raised taxes, deregulated rather than stymied entrepreneurialism, and expanded energy leasing on federal lands and green-lighted pipeline construction.  His current foreign policy team of Bolton, Mattis, and Pompeo is impressive and seeks to restore U.S. deterrence that will bring far more stability to the world than mushy lead from behind subordination. A possible Chinese agreement to cut their trade surpluses and play by international trading rules, and a North Korean guarantee of denuclearization would be the most significant foreign policy developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Where has Trump’s MAGA agenda stalled?

And why? Who stalled it?

Answer: The Republican Party:

A Republican majority House and Senate squandered a rare chance for radical change between 2017-2018 by failing to repeal and reform Obamacare, failing to build a border wall, failing to pass an immigration law that would secure the border and ensure only meritocratic, legal, diverse and measured immigration, and failing to stop out of control spending and debt by addressing unsustainable entitlements.

Both both President Trump and the Republican Party failed to foresee how low the Democrats would sink:

Trump and the Republican Party also have underestimated the effects of radical changes and protocols in voting laws, such as voter harvesting in California that has made Election Day totals largely irrelevant. Trump has neither chipped away at the 90-percent negative coverage of the media nor yet made it irrelevant. …

Inept Justice Department decisions led to the venomous Mueller investigation that ignored real wrongdoing as it chased a Trump collusion unicorn. In some sense, if Trump’s election as the first president without either political or military experience was unprecedented, equally unparalleled was a 90 percent hostile media, coup-like attempts to abort a presidency through absurd resorts to the Logan Act, Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, lawsuits, impeachment writs, and non-stop celebrity talk of assassination, and death and destruction to the Trump family. Almost any other man Trump’s age would long ago have collapsed under the stress and venom.

The future of Trump’s solid two years of achievement is uncertain. The more his economic policies and foreign affairs bring results, the more the hatred of him grows, both inside and outside his own party.

So Trump’s three signature long-term agendas hang in the balance — checking China’s often ruthless rise to global commercial and eventual military supremacy, growing an economy that includes preeminent American manufacturing, energy production, and industrial output, and ending the idea of a bicoastal elite adjudicating politics and culture for a supposedly backward and declining traditional interior.

No one knows quite how to fathom Trump’s paradox. His extraordinary powers of resilience and retaliation stave off the constant assaults from progressives and the media, and such defiance inspires a red-state America. Yet so far Trump’s caustic retorts also stymie winning over enough swing and minority voters to achieve a 51 percent ruling majority to ensure his ideas of restored greatness.

Is that so? His tweets are his undoing? Yet they are instant communications with his constituency. His loyal followers like them. And their votes put him in the White House.

For now, Trump’s fate may be in the hands of others—as it was in 2016 when what put him over the top was wide scale repugnance at the thought of a corrupt President Clinton and all that her victory would entail. The final take-over of the Democratic Party by progressive extremists might well empower Trump to reelection.

Yet it is a scary idea that the fate of making America great again might hinge on the nihilism of the Democratic Party.

Not if the Democratic Party is defeated in 2020.

It is quite possible, it is even likely, that Donald Trump will be one of the great restorers of history whose achievements endure.

President Obama has reduced the number of US warships in the strategically important region of the Persian Gulf. There’s not a single US aircraft carrier in the region. Now Russian warships have arrived there, being serviced at Gulf ports they have never had the use of before; and Iran has sent its navy into the Gulf of Aden. These maneuvers are co-ordinated by Russia and Iran.  

Furthermore, Iran recently launched its long-range missile, and North Korea, which co-operates with Iran on missile development, has demonstrated that it now possesses nuclear warheads. North Korea is in the business of selling its nuclear technology. Not only Iran, but Syria, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and probably Venezuela are among its eager customers.

North Korea is threatening war on South Korea. The danger extends to Japan, and to all countries within the range of Iran’s and North Korea’s missiles, including Europe and the US.

But the US administration does nothing about it.

 From the Oneida Dispatch:

With tensions high on the Korean peninsula, Chinese fishing boats left the region, possibly to avoid any maritime skirmishes between the two Koreas. But U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the situation was not a crisis and no additional U.S. troops would be sent to the region…

South Korean and U.S. troops facing North Korea raised their surveillance on Thursday to its highest level since 2006, when North Korea tested its first nuclear device. About 28,000 American troops are stationed across the South…

In Washington, the Army’s top officer, Gen. George Casey, expressed confidence that the U.S. could fight a conventional war against North Korea if necessary, despite continuing conflicts elsewhere.

But [Defense Secretary] Gates, en route to Singapore for regional defense talks, tried to lower the temperature.

“I don’t think that anybody in the (Obama) administration thinks there is a crisis,” Gates told reporters aboard his military jet early Friday…

The two Koreas technically remain at war because they signed a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953…

 So despite what the pathetic Gates ‘thinks’ the US administration ‘thinks’, there is a crisis in the East, threatening the West and Western interests.

The US needs to act, but its Commander-in-Chief has no intention of doing anything effective, either because he doesn’t understand what’s going on, or because he sees no evil in it.

It is tempting to speculate imaginatively: If the US had a Churchill or Truman in command, what would he do now? Churchill bombed Dresden flat to hasten the end of the Second World War. Truman dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to achieve the same end. In the present crisis might not either of them decide that Pyongyang needs to be destroyed? Would they not launch ICBMs with nuclear warheads to do the job quickly and thoroughly? Not only would an evil nuisance be eliminated from the world, but the psychological shock-wave would most likely stop Iran in its tracks; dumbfound Hizbollah, Hamas, and the Saudis; freeze the global jihad; silence Russia and China; paralyze the Taliban; knock the breath out of Chavez and all the little dictators who had begun to think the US was finished as a super-power. After some mopping up operations  – taking out the enemy’s nuclear development sites – we reckon there would be a long period of peace.

But we don’t have a Churchill or Truman. We have Obama, so the international crisis will intensify and spread.