Tag Archives: foreign policy

EU Version of Brexit

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EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker says that the risk of a no-deal Brexit is very real.  He also says he told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

…I have no emotional attachment to the backstop.  But I made clear that I do have an intimate connection to its commitments. I have asked the prime minister to make, in writing, alternatives.

The commitment of the backstop, the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which violates a central premise of the vote to leave the EU—British control of British borders—still amounts to a backdoor to partitioning Great Britain. Keep in mind that one of the EU’s early offers on this backstop was that Great Britain could put its hard border on the Irish Sea coast—an offer quickly deleted when its purpose was recognized as too obviously presented.

On top of that, Juncker has shown his unseriousness in these “negotiations” with his demand that Great Britain offer all the alternatives. Juncker has no need, apparently, to stoop so low as to offer his own.

Indeed, led by chief negotiator Michel Barnier,

EU negotiators say that he [Johnson] is yet to offer a viable replacement solution.

Because if they offered their own solution, and Great Britain accepted it, then Juncker and his court would have actually to say, “Yes,” finally.

It’s hard to see how negotiations can get more bad faith than this.  Juncker is like an emperor on the throne awaiting the pleas of his supplicant.

Strength of Consent

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The people of Hong Kong are in their 15th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

  • independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality
  • amnesty for arrested protesters
  • electoral reforms to allow Hong Kongers to vote for their own leaders
  • formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens (and anyone else arrested) to be sent to the PRC for trial and jail
  • Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation

Lam has “promised” to formally withdraw the extradition bill, but she has not honored her promise, and she has categorically rejected the others. Lam’s “promise” was a cynical effort to divide and weaken the protest movement.

However, as The Wall Street Journal put it in the article at the link,

The scale of the crowds Sunday evoked mass marches earlier this summer, suggesting efforts by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to weaken and divide the opposition movement are having little effect, and the crisis remains a challenge for the Chinese leadership in Beijing.

This protestor illustrates the matter.

The PRC’s President Xi Jinping has a golden opportunity, here, to demonstrate the strength of consenting to the citizens’ demands, but he’s overtly eschewing it. He, and his Chinese Communist Party cronies, are simply too insecure to take the step.  And not just politically: they’re personally and emotionally too insecure.

Intransigence

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that if he’s reelected later this month, he’ll begin annexing territories in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea.  Naturally, the Palestine Liberation Organization and its European Union apologists are in a snoot over it. An anonymously presented EU spokesperson says

The policy of settlement construction and expansion…is illegal under international law and its continuation, and actions taken in this context, undermine the viability of the two-state solution and the prospects for a lasting peace[.]

The PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi says that

Netanyahu exposed his “real political agenda of superimposing ‘greater Israel’ on all of historical Palestine [and] carrying out an ethnic cleansing agenda.”

And so on.

Yet, this is what Palestinian intransigence, along with the steady drumbeat of the PLO’s Hamas terrorism, lately enhanced by Iran’s Hezbollah attacks from within Syria, have pushed Israel into.  The Israelis have nothing to lose with this move, and there is nothing possible to gain from continuing the past policies of failure.

A Different Sort of National Security Threat

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This one demographic; it’s the potential for population collapse in the People’s Republic of China.  Most of the nations of the world outside Africa face population declines, but none seem as severe as the PRC’s is looking to be.

In 2016, after the one-child policy was abandoned, there were 17.86 million births. This dropped to 17.2 million in 2017 and 15.2 million in 2018—the third-lowest rate since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

That might be an accelerating drop, although three data points don’t make for a strongly measured trend.

There’s this datum, too, from Yi Fuxian, Senior Scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Medical School Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology:

In China in 2017, the ratio was six workers in the 20-64 age bracket supporting one senior citizen at least 65 years old. This will decline to 2.0 workers in 2039 and 1.6 in 2050.
“No social security net, no family security, and a pension crisis—this will evolve into a humanitarian catastrophe. As women live six to seven years longer than men on average [and are usually a few years younger than their husbands], they will be the main victims of population control,” said Yi.

And this from George Magnus, an Oxford University China Centre Research Associate:

Measured by the proportion of 65+ and the old age dependency ratio, China will age as much in the next 22 years as most Western economies have done in the last 60-70 years—and at far lower levels of income per head, and with a much less developed social security system[.]

It’s unlikely to get better in time to do anything meaningful: the PRC’s fertility rate, the number of children born per woman, as of 2018 is 1.6—far below the 2.1 rate required just to maintain the population at its current level.

But it’s more than just aging women or aging generally.  This is the size of its labor force in absolute terms, too, with its production capacity. The number of Chinese in the labor force is the economic underpinning of the nation and its ability to keep itself armed—to the degree the Communist Party of China and its People’s Liberation Army deem sufficient—and able to face the enemies perceived by the CPC and the PLA.

That economic underpinning also is critical to the nation’s ability to keep its people, including those actively working, fed and housed.

What will a desperate Xi Jinping or Xi-successor do in the face of this crisis?  We need to be prepared diplomatically, economically, and humanitarianly.  And militarily, since neither Xi nor his successor are likely to accept this crisis without resorting to force and invasions to “capture” workers and baby-makers.

Carrie Lam and Hong Kong

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said she’ll fully and formally withdraw her/People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s extradition bill completely.  She even issued a formal statement claiming that, among other things.  Many are touting this, and the other things, as major concessions to the demonstrators that have been in the streets of Hong Kong in their hundreds of thousands, even millions, for the last several months.

Those protestors have been demanding the bill’s formal and irrevocable withdrawal, Lam’s resignation, and an independent investigation into police misbehaviors during those protest demonstrations, among others things.

Lam, of course, has made no concession at all.

She has said she will not resign.  Indeed, she has said in a carefully orchestrated leak of a “private” conversation that she has no choice but to not resign.

There’s nothing in Lam’s statement about when she will withdraw the extradition bill, only her claim that she’ll do so. Sometime. Aside from that, there is not even a syllable of enforceable commitment that she, or her successor, won’t simply introduce an identical bill at some later time.

In response to the demand for an independent investigation, Lam

claimed that a probe of police enforcement actions is “best handled by the existing and well-established Independent Police Complaints Council.”

This is especially disingenuous.  Lam ignored the plain fact that

[t]he council has authority merely to “observe, monitor, and review” internal police investigations and make recommendations, without the independent power even to summon witnesses. Council members are appointed by Ms Lam, who answers to Beijing.

The rest of Lam’s disingenuous statement is just further commitment that “her” government will investigate itself.

Lam and her fellows must resign (I’m expanding; the good people of Hong Kong have only asked for her resignation).  That’s necessary for the symbolism of the deed, even as it would be only symbolic: the citizens of Hong Kong are allowed to “elect” a government only from candidates approved by the PRC. Lam’s and her fellows’ replacements would only be more of her and her ilk.