… is worse than you fear.

Now the revelation bursts upon us that Donald Trump never really stood a chance of being re-elected, even if every living citizen had voted for him.

And Americans stood no chance of remaining free. 

The vast movement to dissolve the founder’s Republic of America was begun long before the 2016 election of Donald Trump. His four years were an unexpected interruption of the reorganization of the human world into a global community of helots ruled by an oligarchic dictatorship.

America will now have a system not only like China’s oligarchic dictatorship, but in partnership with it.

It took decades for China to gain the subservience of an American government. It was finally achieved with the defeat of President Trump and the election to the presidency of Joe Biden.

Trump had seen the danger and had tried to counter it. But the forces ranged against him were far too numerous and far too powerful.

It suits Communist China very well to have Joe Biden as a figurehead president of the United States. For the Chinese, his senility is an asset. In any case, they own him. They own his son, they own his family. They have filled the Bidens’ coffers. It was probably they who chose him to be the Democratic Party’s candidate. They own the Democratic Party.

Does all  this seem too far fetched?

Lee Smith, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, explains how the process and the triumph were worked. The article is long. We select the telling points – which requires some change of the original order – and strongly recommend the reading of the whole thing.

The poisoned embrace between American elites and China began nearly 50 years ago when Henry Kissinger saw that opening relations between the two then-enemies would expose the growing rift between China and the more threatening Soviet Union. At the heart of the fallout between the two communist giants was the Soviet leadership’s rejection of Stalin, which the Chinese would see as the beginning of the end of the Soviet communist system—and thus it was a mistake they wouldn’t make.

Meanwhile, Kissinger’s geopolitical maneuver became the cornerstone of his historical legacy. It also made him a wealthy man selling access to Chinese officials. In turn, Kissinger pioneered the way for other former high-ranking policymakers to engage in their own foreign influence-peddling operations, like William Cohen, defense secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who greased the way for China to gain permanent most favored nation trade status in 2000 and become a cornerstone of the World Trade Organization.

The Cohen Group has two of its four overseas offices in China, and includes a number of former top officials, including Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who recently failed to disclose his work for the Cohen Group when he criticized the Trump administration’s “with us or against us” approach to China in an editorial. “The economic prosperity of U.S. allies and partners hinges on strong trade and investment relationships with Beijing,” wrote Mattis, who was literally being paid by China for taking exactly that position.

Yet it’s unlikely that Kissinger foresaw China as a cash cow for former American officials when he and President Richard M. Nixon traveled to the Chinese capital that Westerners then called Peking in 1972. “The Chinese felt that Mao had to die before they could open up,” says a former Trump administration official. “Mao was still alive when Nixon and Kissinger were there, so it’s unlikely they could’ve envisioned the sorts of reforms that began in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. But even in the 1980s China wasn’t competitive with the United States. It was only in the 1990s with the debates every year about granting China most favored nation status in trade that China became a commercial rival”—and a lucrative partner. …

Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.

In 1978, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein befriended Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of Shanghai and eventually president of China. As mayor of America’s tech epicenter, her ties to China helped the growing sector attract Chinese investment and made the state the world’s third-largest economy. Her alliance with Jiang also helped make her investor husband, Richard Blum, a wealthy man. As senator, she pushed for permanent MFN trade status for China by rationalizing China’s human rights violations, while her friend Jiang consolidated his power and became the Communist Party’s general secretary by sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Feinstein defended him. “China had no local police,” Feinstein said that Jiang had told her. “Hence the tanks,” the senator from California reassuringly explained. “But that’s the past. One learns from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a lesson.” …

Clearly, big money was to be made from China. Democrats could overlook little matters like what happened in Tiananmen Square. It wasn’t the Communist government’s fault. They had no police, so they had to use tanks. Anyway, it was a learning experience for them and they’ll never do anything like that again. Look on the bright side, where the money glitters.

The American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. …

[That] disenchanted elite … impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite … saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016.  … The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.

As Lee Smith sees it, Trump himself was the creator of the “China Class” – because opposition to him united disparate interests which were all the beneficiaries of Chinese patronage. It’s an accusation, and as such unfair since that was not the president’s intention. Smith explains:

What [Trump] called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.

A great many Americans in technology, sport, commerce, academia, bureaucracy, politics …

…benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship. These strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security.

Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

They “gorged themselves on Chinese money” – not without a trace of shame in some cases?

The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them. …

But then came a freebie from China that was not welcome:

China was the source of the China Class’s power, [and] the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

So there was really no need for the China Class to feel shame or guilt. Ordinary Americans “deserved” unemployment and poverty. Because … because … they’re racist.

For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.

… Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes. … The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded …

A startling accusation that – of human sacrifice on a huge scale! But it is true that it happened.

And the Chinese virus made no difference to the China Class’s opposition to President Trump:

The number of American industries and companies that lobbied against Trump administration measures attempting to decouple Chinese technology from its American counterparts is a staggering measure of how closely two rival systems that claim to stand for opposing sets of values and practices have been integrated. Companies like Ford, FedEx, and Honeywell, as well as Qualcomm and other semiconductor manufacturers that fought to continue selling chips to Huawei, all exist with one leg in America and the other leg planted firmly in America’s chief geopolitical rival. To protect both halves of their business, they soft-sell the issue by calling China a competitor in order to obscure their role in boosting a dangerous rival.

Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.

“It’s so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.

Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere …

Even the Trump administration was split between hawks and accommodationists, caustically referred to by the former as “Panda Huggers”. The majority of Trump officials were in the latter camp, most notably Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Hollywood producer. While the film industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and appease, Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous market without observing CCP redlines.

“In the Trump administration,” says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China. On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push back.”

Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups”. That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.

The idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself [again we stress unintentionally – ed] a focal point [of shared hostility] for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle.

That’s not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.

Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.

Smith omits to mention a fact that is germane to his case and strengthens it – that President Bill Clinton had insistently sold American scientific, technological and military secrets to China.

The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence and interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies. …

Smith notes that the CIA – the agency created to protect the United States from foreign intrusion of all kinds – stores its information with Amazon Web Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.

Joe Biden is China’s man. He is now openly demonstrating his compliance with the CCP’s wishes:

As head of the Center for American Progress think tank, Biden’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, teamed up with a U.S.-China exchange organization created as a front “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” of the CCP and “influence overseas Chinese communities, foreign governments, and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing”.

Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State Security.

U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a 2019 speech at a Chinese-government-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah, Georgia, where she praised China’s role in promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa. “I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she said. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.”

The Biden family … was reportedly given an interest-free loan of $5 million by businessmen with ties to the Chinese military. Hunter [Biden] called his Chinese business partner the “spy chief of China”. The reason that the press and social media censored pre-election reports of Hunter Biden’s alleged ties to the CCP was not to protect him—$5 million is less than what Bezos has made every hour during the course of the pandemic. No, for the pro-China oligarchy, the point of getting Joe Biden elected was to protect themselves. …

[For] the pro-China oligarchy [now in power in America – ed] … Chinese autocracy is their model. Consider the deployment of more than 20,000 U.S. armed forces members throughout Washington, D.C., to provide security for an inauguration of a president who is rarely seen in public in the wake of a sporadically violent protest march that was cast as an insurrection and a coup; the removal of opposition voices from social media, along with the removal of competing social media platforms themselves; the nascent effort to keep the Trump-supporting half of America from access to health care, credit, legal representation, education, and employment, with the ultimate goal of redefining protest against the policies of the current administration as “domestic terrorism”.

Yes, it all follows the Chinese example. The Democratic Party of America has fast become China’s star pupil.

Smith writes:

Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly.

And:

What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen.

And:

The American oligarchy … are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.

The writer concludes his article with a suggestion that the American oligarchy will not last long.

But why not? Now that Donald Trump has gone, who or what will work against it? Who or what can overthrow it?

The Superpimp, the pleasure-host of the world’s globalist elite, of the nomenklatura of all the nations, of the Whole World Community Organizers, of the priests of catastrophic climate change, was Jeffrey Epstein.

Cliff Kincaid explains in some detail at Canada Free Press:

The late billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia is what has interested the media. But his own blog, which is still active even after his death, suggests what he and his fellow elites were really interested in. He called it “cutting edge science”. It is how the global elites intend to manage our lives. They already claim credit for “rewriting our global culture”.

“Jeffrey Epstein is a former member of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Committee at Harvard, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Science and a former Rockefeller University Board Member,” his website proclaimed. “Mr. Epstein is also an active member of the Edge Organization.”

You can’t get higher-up than Epstein. This is the crème de la crème of the American establishment. But as Patrick Wood, Editor of Technocracy News & Trends, notes, “He had no visible or logical means of creating wealth, although he spent a fortune on various pet projects.”

Wood comments that Epstein was definitely NOT like “the typical member” of the Trilateral Commission (TC) or Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “He had no compelling outward qualifications as far as I can tell, but if you think about the TC and CFR as being potentially useful for nefarious purposes, then Epstein was the blackmailer and his secret and real profession was sex trafficking and pedophilia,” Wood adds, “It has been alleged that every room in his mansions had hidden cameras that filmed everything and everyone, and that the videos taken were stored offsite in a still-undisclosed location. These will never be released because they implicate so many of the global elite.”

Actually, there have been no published examples of Epstein having sexual relations with children. With young women who were under the age of consent in most US states, yes, and that is inaccurately called “pedophilia”. And sure the girls were young enough to be considered victims. But they were old enough to know what they were doing and have their own reasons for doing it. Such as, to make money. A respectable motive in itself.

So it could be argued that his “pedophilia” is not the worst thing about the man. Then in what did his worst villainy lie? Was it that he stole his starter millions (which Kincaid does not mention)?

Or was it simply that he kept and presided over Concupiscence Castle – the Grand Central Brothel – where Our Betters could meet and feast and copulate with young whores and plot to turn the whole world into China, ruled by them? Did all the Great and the Powerful fear the exposure of what Epstein knew about them? Did the Superpimp live high, as Kincaid suggests, on blackmail?

These are serious concerns, and there is no guilt by association. But Epstein’s mysterious death, at this juncture in history, is extremely significant. Blaming two federal prison guards for his “suicide” cannot be accepted at face value. …

A quick look into one of Epstein’s affiliated groups, the Edge organization, reveals a “Billionaires’ Dinner” with photos of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post; Jeffrey Epstein; and many others. “Guests have included the leading third culture intellectuals of our time, dining and conversing with the founders of Amazon, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Space X, Skype, Twitter,” says the website. “It is a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds—the people that are rewriting our global culture.”

This new global order is based on Scientism, a philosophy attractive to the global elites which holds that a small group of powerful people will manage the future through technocracy. Some of these people believe in “transhumanism,” the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical characteristics, creating a virtual super-race of humans.

Epstein, for example, “planned on using his own semen to impregnate the chosen ones and thus improve the human race,” notes Wood. “Epstein also planned to cryonically freeze his head and his penis, so that future science could bring him back to life to live forever.”

That organ must have served him well. Reliably. He wouldn’t want to risk having an untested substitute.

In this way, Epstein believed that he would, personally, be resurrected and experience a form of eternal life.

While this kind of approach sounds fantastic, the fact is that Epstein, a college dropout, was highly regarded by such elite organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Harvard University.  As reported by the Harvard Crimson, “He cultivated cozy friendships with top Harvard administrators including a former University president” and pledged a $30 million donation to Harvard to fund the University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “Our work is about understanding the past, managing the present, and helping to build the future,” it says.

Epstein was accepted into the “Chairman’s Circle” of the CFR’s top donors but the group’s president, Richard Haass, has tried to distance himself from Epstein after his death. However, the Trilateral Commission, whose membership is by invitation only, has not said anything publicly about his involvement with the organization.

Research into the agenda of these organizations is as important as finding out those who were rubbing elbows (or other body parts) with Epstein or the young girls in his harem.  How could someone with enormous wealth, obtained through mysterious circumstances, reach the pinnacle of power. Was it because of his keen intellect?   

The Trilateral Commission’s goal has always been the “deeper integration and greater globalization” of the world’s economies but asserts that such a process has been jeopardized by “populism and nationalism”.

It has! And that’s very good news. We have President Trump to thank for it.

That’s a reference to the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. President and the Brexit process of leaving the European Union in Britain. In the words of the Trilateral Commission, the future of humanity is threatened.

By which the Trilateral Commission means that its plan, to bring humanity under world Communist government by Those Who Know Best, is threatened.

The Trilateral Commission Summer 2019 report, Democracies Under Stress, reflects the current political thinking of the global elite who invited Epstein  to join their “prestigious” organizations and attend their “dinners”. It states, “All of this [stress] is occurring at a time when Beijing is offering the world what many see as a viable alternative to democracy.”

The “many” is not defined. But speaking for themselves, in terms of the “many,” these global elites apparently see the U.S. experiment in constitutional self-government as less efficient than China’s rule by the communist elite. 

This report from the Trilateral Commission features two pictures of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a prominent member of the North American Group. One shows Kissinger with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who fooled the West with Glasnost and Perestroika while pursuing the goal of world communism with the support of “socialists” and environmentalists in the West. Former top Jimmy Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also “played an important role in the formation” of the Trilateral Commission and served as its first director from 1973 to 1976. By the way, his daughter is Mika Brzezinski, a host on the Trump-hating MSNBC cable channel. She is married to co-host Joe Scarborough. Both are members of the CFR.

Media organizations represented by Trilateral Commission members include NBC News, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Clearly, they, too, play a major role in shaping the culture. 

What, no George Soros? He too is a TC member.

The heavy media presence in the organization explains why commission meetings and reports are not examined critically or even covered. Hence, we can assume one is invited to join such an organization, “by invitation only,” and stay involved, based on favorable coverage, or non-coverage, of what this organization actually does. That virtually guarantees that “whistleblowers” will never come forward with inside information about their plans.

But Patrick Wood, who co-authored the book, Trilaterals Over Washington, has watched the activities of the organization for many years and says there is no doubt that China has always been the key to the plans of the TC. He notes that Kissinger started the relationship with China under President Nixon and then Brzezinski completed most of the communist country’s integration into the global economy under President Carter. The goal has been to develop an elaborate scheme of social engineering, a technocracy, which will be used to bring into being an anticipated new worldwide utopian system.

*

A note about the Trilateral Commission’s aims:

Cliff Kincaid’s assertion that a “worldwide utopian system” is the ultimate goal of the Trilateral Commission seems to be denied by the Commission itself in Democracies Under Stress. There are such assertions as: “ A shift in the mindset of traditional elites [is needed] from lamenting the decline of democracy to taking action to defend it”; “[The TC can give] inspiration and reassurance to those who have traditionally looked to the United States and its allies as democratic models by underscoring the continued commitment of its member states to democracy, the rule of law, and free and open markets”.

And then there is this:

The democracies of North America, Europe, and Asia must be revitalized in order to ensure that they—not the authoritarian regimes gaining confidence and establishing themselves more firmly on the global stage [by which they mean chiefly the Trump administration] – are the ones that offer workable solutions to the dilemmas of our rapidly changing world [they mean chiefly China]. Unlike at other times, many of the governments of the advanced democracies—the original architects of the international system underpinning decades of relative peace and prosperity [?] —are no longer the best safeguards of their own democratic workings, nor ardent advocates of the ability of democracies to tackle global ills collectively. The Trilateral Commission is well-poised to play a vital role in this revitalization effort, and seeks to once again become an analytical home for assessing the stresses on the advanced democracies, offering solutions for dealing with them, and catalyzing cooperation among these countries on global economic, political, and security matters.

Ah, now! Plainly to the undeceived reader’s eye, the TC has one chief purpose, and it stresses that purpose throughout the article. It is writ so large that it could easily be missed. Its reason for existence is to advance internationalism of a kind and in a manner that the UN was not designed and could not be used to achieve: the establishment of unchallengeable central global power by a cabal of the like-minded elite. One hint that the plan involves redistribution of wealth – despite the claimed support for free markets – lies in the recurring phrase “climate change”.

Examples:

Prospects for … adequately addressing climate change are slim as long as advanced democracies are compromised by internal divisions and governed by institutions that are no longer well-suited to the realities of the day.

The Commission has three groups: one for North America, one for Europe, and one for Asia (expanded … to include South Korea, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Australia, China and others)… [T]he trilateral structure is essential to catalyze cooperation to meet pressing global problems—from nuclear proliferation to climate change to pandemics to growing protectionism.

“Climate change” is a chosen problem because it seems obviously to need an international solution. “Advanced democracies” cannot deal with it because of clashes of policy and opinion  which make for changing governments (so that nationalist and populist governments can and do get elected), and their institutions (such as multiple competing parties and branches of government with separated powers) are “no longer well suited to the realities of the day”.

The UN has tried and failed to scare the nations into yielding up autonomy in the interest of saving the planet from freezing or burning or becoming a globe of salt water, but these saviors of democracy … of “democracy”, Communist style, not of the separate autonomous genuine democracies … could have better luck, they hope, in bringing off the trick without rousing suspicion of the real  motive feebly disguised in ambiguity.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal titled A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse, Henry Kissinger wrote:

ISIS’s claim has given the millennium-old split between the Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam an apocalyptic dimension. The remaining Sunni states feel threatened by both the religious fervor of ISIS as well as by Shiite Iran, potentially the most powerful state in the region. Iran compounds its menace by presenting itself in a dual capacity. On one level, Iran acts as a legitimate Westphalian state conducting traditional diplomacy, even invoking the safeguards of the international system. At the same time, it organizes and guides nonstate actors seeking regional hegemony based on jihadist principles: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria; Hamas in Gaza; the Houthis in Yemen. Thus the Sunni Middle East risks engulfment by four concurrent sources: Shiite-governed Iran and its legacy of Persian imperialism; ideologically and religiously radical movements striving to overthrow prevalent political structures; conflicts within each state between ethnic and religious groups arbitrarily assembled after World War I into (now collapsing) states; and domestic pressures stemming from detrimental political, social and economic domestic policies … The U.S. should be prepared for a dialogue with an Iran returning to its role as a Westphalian state within its established borders.

What was Kissinger talking about? What did he mean by “a legitimate Westphalian state”? What does “Westphalian” mean?

Commander J. E. Dyer views what is happening in the Middle East – and so in the world – very much as we do (though she approaches it from a different angle). She discusses Kissinger’s article and explains what is meant by “Westphalian”.

She writes:

Reading Henry Kissinger’s typically well-considered and intelligent article for the Wall Street Journal this weekend (“A Path out of the Middle East Collapse”), I had a growing sense that it isn’t so much a prescription for the future as a description of the past.

We wholly agree. Dr. Kissinger is not seeing the world as it is. He has not grasped – or been hit by – the import of the events that are unfolding: millions of Sunni Muslims, terrified of the power America has put in the hands of Shia Iran, flowing in a great tidal wave out of the Middle East to break on Europe’s shores and swamp the continent.

The sense began with the first paragraph, in which Kissinger defines the scope of what’s collapsing, and dates it only to 1973, when the U.S. moved to stabilize the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War.

But far more than recent U.S. policy on the Middle East is collapsing today.  What we’re seeing is more like the collapse of “Rome” itself:  the organization of Western power as a Europe-centric territorial phenomenon, setting unbreachable boundaries north, south, and west of a restless and perennially “unorganizable” Middle East.

Last year, we might have said that it was “Sykes-Picot” that was collapsing: a popular shorthand reference to the European colonial disposition of Middle Eastern boundaries at the end of World War I.  But that was last year.  Now it’s 2015, and with the utter paralysis of Western nations in the face of massive and unforeseen, unarmed migration, it’s clear that Roman Europe itself is no longer a meaningful reality.

Consider:  the Roman Empire in its heyday would not have tolerated this migration.  Neither would the Europe of muscular Christendom, or the Europe of trading monarchies, of the Westphalian nation-state era, of the “concert of Europe” era, or of the Cold War.  As long as Europe had a civilizational idea of defending and preserving itself, the legacy of Rome was alive.  Altered, perhaps, with the passage of time and the emergence of new ideas, but still kicking.

Today, the legacy of Rome looks to be an empty shell.  There is territory left, of course – but there is no idea.  In fact, the West has spent much of the last 50 years apologizing for ever having had its signature idea, and vowing to no longer have it.

Without that idea, the West has no motive to organize itself against destruction, either internal or from an external source.  The idea of the West is ultimately what has collapsed, at least as an organizing principle that preserved for many centuries, and for multiple purposes, the security boundaries of “Rome.”

And with that collapse goes the whole structure of expectations that made Dr. Kissinger’s prescription for American policy possible.

This point crystallized for me at the end of his article, when he wrote these words (emphasis added):

The U.S. role in such a Middle East [i.e., with a stability structure supported by U.S. policy] would be to implement the military assurances in the traditional Sunni states that the administration promised during the debate on the Iranian nuclear agreement, and which its critics have demanded.

In this context, Iran’s role can be critical. The U.S. should be prepared for a dialogue with an Iran returning to its role as a Westphalian state within its established borders.

But that’s just the problem.  Without a dominant European idea – the civilizationally confident Europe of “Rome” – there is no such thing as a Westphalian state.  There is no form of power or authority that can enforce Westphalian rules.  Nor is there any great nation with a motive to enforce them.

This is too big a subject to bite off all of in a single blog post.

We found that too. This is a vast, deep, and overwhelmingly important subject. It will take much thinking about, beyond the bewilderment of the present moment.

So let me just look at two aspects of the proposition here.  One is Westphalianism itself, and why we should recognize that it must be under assault from today’s events.

Ultimately, what we call Westphalianism, after the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, is an attempt to enable nation-states to coexist pragmatically – a good in itself, enshrined as the “advantage of the other,” or the “common good” – without settling theological questions. …

The nations of 1648 had no intention of ceasing to see themselves as Christian organizations on the earth.  What they intended to do was cease making theological disputes (i.e., Protestant versus Catholic disputes, which were the main ones among the belligerents at the time) a casus belli between them.

Westphalia was a watershed statement … that the armed might of the state should not be used, implicitly against the common good, to vindicate or enforce specific theological interpretations of God. The genius of Westphalianism is that the scope of national sovereignty is held to be not limitless, but limited. …  Westphalianism leaves the things of God to God, and attends to the things of Caesar.  Westphalianism is based on a moral assumption, but is essentially an idea of pragmatism.

This is why the resurgence of apocalyptic Islam is antithetical to Westphalianism. … Predatory Shia Iran and the rise of Sunni state-Islamism – not only in the form of ISIS, but in the form of the longer-organized Muslim Brotherhood – are real and meaningful evidence that the bloody, thrashing Islamism of today is not Westphalian, and cannot be. … 

Which is to say, “is not tolerant, and cannot be”.

The premise of Westphalianism is that all the nations are trying to get along, and need a modus vivendi to regularize things.

The premise of Islamism is that nationhood itself doesn’t matter – indeed, is there to thwart Islamic unity, and must be overset.

These two premises can’t coexist.  The Treaty of Westphalia was signed by a group of nations that all agreed on nationhood.  Even internationalist Communism, the horseman of apocalypse in the 20th century, had uses for nationhood that could keep it pragmatically satisfied for decades.  Communism was willing to accept that the state would eventually wither away, but still act like a state in the meantime.

Islamism sees the nation-state as a rampart of evil, blocking the path of the caliphate.  Islamism has the excuse of belief for not respecting the rules of state sovereignty under Westphalianism.

We can’t assume away the strength or pervasiveness of the Islamist challenge to Westphalianism.  Maybe as recently as 2014, it was possible to be complacent about that.  But the earthquake of migration into Europe has reached a level that is proving against Europe, on a daily basis, that Westphalianism is not even in operation anymore.  This is the second aspect of the problem that we have to consider.

The current migration crisis means Westphalianism is dead.

If Westphalianism were still in operation, the migrant crisis wouldn’t have reached its current proportions.  Westphalian states would see it, properly, as something to defend themselves against, and would take pragmatic measures to stem the tide.  Those measures would include intervention abroad, to stabilize foreign conditions, and paying other nations to take the migrants, as well as setting strict limits on immigration and advertising clearly that the doors were closed.  Deportation and physical barriers would be seen as regrettable, perhaps, but hardly as moral evils.

The Westphalian view is clear that humaneness doesn’t demand sacrificing the benefits of national sovereignty for hundreds of millions of people.  Yet that self-abnegating idea is the default proposition governing the response of Europe – and even of the United States – to the current migration crisis.

If the West won’t enforce Westphalianism in defense of its own territory and communities, there’s no reason to think Westphalianism will be enforced on Iran.  The unenforceability of the JCPOA on Iran’s nuclear program arises from the same deficit of Western confidence in the use of state power.

And because the fundamental clash going on is between Islamism and a collapsing idea of Western civilization, this dynamic is too big to be put in balance by a mere restoration to the framework of 1973 or 1919.  That’s not actually possible, in any case – and even 1818 and 1648 don’t go far enough back. Those dates were about Christian states proving things to themselves.

It’s Islamism to which the evolutionary Western idea of multilateralism, limited sovereignty, and freedom of conscience for peoples has now to be proven.  This is a real geopolitical crisis point, not an abstraction.  If necessary, the Western idea has to prove itself over Islamism.

In the process of doing that, “Westphalianism” will inevitably evolve, to some extent.  We will end up rewriting it.  I think we’ll preserve most of it, but it will have to find a way to stand, and not give way, before a religious concept that negates Westphalianism’s very foundation; i.e., the limited-sovereignty nation-state.  I’m not sure we can foresee at the moment what it will all look like when we’re done.

One thing we can say as we part here, however, is that this tremendous crisis in world affairs represents an opportunity, for people who love limited government, freedom, and hope.  

Only with that last sentence we disagree. Commander Dyer’s website is called the Optimistic Conservative. Ours, at this point, though similarly conservative, is pessimistic.

We see the world changing for the worse. We see the idea of liberty slipping away, because the liberal democracies of the West no longer want it. 

We do not understand why they don’t want it, but it seems plain enough that they don’t.

Now for a little light relief.

Senator John McCain, a genuine hero, made a lousy presidential candidate in 2008. We seldom like anything he says.

But today we applaud him for what he said to a despicable bunch of feeble-minded Islam-supporting terrorist-encouraging pacifist Communist feminists – silly women of both sexes.

The Daily Mail reports:

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain uncorked a scathing attack on anti-war protesters who interrupted an Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday …

Activists with the far-left pacifist group CodePink stood with banners when former secretary of state Henry Kissinger entered the room, accusing him of committing war crimes during his tenure as America’s top diplomat and as the national security adviser.

They shook handcuffs in his face and chanted “Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes” while McCain, who chaired the hearing about global threats to the U.S., sat dumbfounded and embarrassed … visibly angry on Thursday when police weren’t on the scene immediately to remove the protesters from the hearing chamber. …

“You know,” he told the group of pink-clad agitators, “you’re going to have to shut up, or I’m going to have you arrested.”

The Capitol Police tardily appeared.

One man, being escorted from the room by a uniformed cop, shouted something back at the senator.

“Get out of here, you low-life scum,” McCain replied.

The audience “erupted in applause”.

Emily Zanotti at The American Spectator writes:

Since it’s rare to feel proud of the work John McCain does in Congress, it’s probably worth keeping this little nugget somewhere deep in your files, so that you can pull it out and remember that somewhere, deep down inside that slowly-melting Maverick, there’s still a passionate heart that burns with an unquenchable desire to smack a hippie back into the last century where she belongs.

This morning, John McCain’s inner beast reared it’s ugly head at Code Pink’s.

Here’s how Charles Krauthammer ends his delectable must-read article on the continuing failure of Obama and his Secretary of State to achieve anything good for America with their ‘smart power’:

Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.