I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society. By Charles Koch.

I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society. By Charles Koch. The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2014.

Charles Koch Pushes Back in Op-Ed. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, April 3, 2014.

Is Charles Koch Un-American? Let Thomas Jefferson Decide. By Richard (RJ) Eskow. The Huffington Post, April 4, 2014.


Koch:

I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles—the principles of a free society—that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.

 

Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation's own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years, primarily through educational efforts. It was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.

 

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

 

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that this could happen. “The natural progress of things,” Jefferson wrote, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” He knew that no government could possibly run citizens’ lives for the better. The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.

 

Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that Arthur Schopenhauer described in the 19th century, that Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th, and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society—and a telltale sign that the collectivists do not have good answers.

 

Rather than try to understand my vision for a free society or accurately report the facts about Koch Industries, our critics would have you believe we’re “un-American” and trying to “rig the system,” that we’re against “environmental protection” or eager to “end workplace safety standards.” These falsehoods remind me of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s observation, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Here are some facts about my philosophy and our company:

 

Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need. According to government figures, our employees and the 143,000 additional American jobs they support generate nearly $11.7 billion in compensation and benefits. About one-third of our U.S.-based employees are union members.

 

Koch employees have earned well over 700 awards for environmental, health and safety excellence since 2009, many of them from the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. EPA officials have commended us for our “commitment to a cleaner environment” and called us “a model for other companies.”

 

Our refineries have consistently ranked among the best in the nation for low per-barrel emissions. In 2012, our Total Case Incident Rate (an important safety measure) was 67% better than a Bureau of Labor Statistics average for peer industries. Even so, we have never rested on our laurels. We believe there is always room for innovation and improvement.

 

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

 

Koch Industries was the only major producer in the ethanol industry to argue for the demise of the ethanol tax credit in 2011. That government handout (which cost taxpayers billions) needlessly drove up food and fuel prices as well as other costs for consumers—many of whom were poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Now the mandate needs to go, so that consumers and the marketplace are the ones who decide the future of ethanol.

 

Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people's lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal.

 

If more businesses (and elected officials) were to embrace a vision of creating real value for people in a principled way, our nation would be far better off—not just today, but for generations to come. I'm dedicated to fighting for that vision. I'm convinced most Americans believe it's worth fighting for, too.

Jeremiah Denton for the Ages. By Rich Lowry.

Jeremiah Denton for the Ages. By Rich Lowry. National Review Online, April 1, 2014. Additional comments at NRO blog The Corner.

Jeremiah Denton Blinking Morse Code “T-O-R-T-U-R-E.” Video. luck3148, January 23, 2013. YouTube.




Lowry:

Jeremiah Denton, the Vietnam War POW who has died at age 89, uttered one of the great statements of defiance in American history.

 

In 1965, he was shot down in his A-6 during a bombing run over North Vietnam. He became a captive for more than seven years and endured an unimaginable regime of torture, humiliation, and isolation, managing to retain his dignity and spirit even as his captors went to hideous lengths to snuff them out.

 

Soon after his capture, a young North Vietnamese solider signaled to him to bow down and, when he refused, pressed a gun to his head so hard it created a welt. Denton quickly learned that this would be mild treatment. He was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, or the Hanoi Hilton, where he led the resistance to the North Vietnamese efforts to extract propaganda confessions from their prisoners.

 

As Denton related in his book, When Hell Was in Session, they tried to starve one out of him. After days, he began to hallucinate, but he still refused. They took him to what was called the Meathook Room and beat him. Then, they twisted his arms with ropes and relented just enough to keep him from passing out. They rolled an iron bar onto his legs and jumped up and down on it. For hours.

 

He agreed finally to give them a little of what they wanted, but at first his hands were too weak to write and his voice too weak to speak. He hadn’t recovered from this ordeal when the Vietnamese told him he would appear at a press conference.

 

Denton told a fellow POW that his plan was to “blow it wide open.” He famously blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code during the interview, a message picked up by naval intelligence and the first definitive word of what the prisoners were being subjected to. When asked what he thought of his government’s war, Denton replied, “Whatever the position of my government is, I believe in it, yes sir. I’m a member of that government, and it’s my job to support it, and I will as long as I live.”

 

The legend is that under the pressure of the Inquisition, Galileo said of the Earth, “Yet, it moves.” That Martin Luther said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

 

Denton’s words aren’t an embellishment. They were seen by millions when they were broadcast in the United States, and he almost immediately paid for them in torment so horrifying that he desperately prayed that he wouldn’t go insane.

 

For two years, he was confined in what was dubbed “Alcatraz,” reserved for the “darkest criminals who persist in inciting the other criminals to oppose the Camp Authority,” in the words of one of the guards. Alvin Townley, author of the book Defiant, writes of the Alcatraz prisoners and their wives back in the States, “Together, they overcame more intense hardship over more years than any other group of servicemen and families in American history.”

 

When the American involvement in the war ended and the POWs finally were released, Denton made a brief statement on the tarmac upon his return, no less powerful for its simplicity and understatement: “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our commander in chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America.”

 

A Roman Catholic, Denton told his family that he had forgiven his captors and, after recounting to them on his first night back what he had gone through, that he didn’t want to speak to them of it again. His son James says he often heard him say — with typical modesty — “That’s over. I don’t want to be a professional jailbird.”

 

He certainly wasn’t that. Denton went on to become a U.S. senator from Alabama. With his passing, we’ve lost a hero whose example of faithfulness and duty should be for the ages.


Jeremiah Denton was the very model of a Jacksonian warrior and hero.

The Elder and the “Assumed Symmetry Fallacy.” By Michael Lumish.

The Elder and the “Assumed Symmetry Fallacy.” By Michael Lumish. Israel Thrives, April 3, 2014. Also at Elder of Ziyon.

Lumish:

The Elder of Ziyon has a recent piece entitled, Peter Beinart cannot tell the difference between a “narrative” and a fact.

 

Speaking before a group of Democrats and progressives, former New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, said the following concerning conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson:

In 2008, when Tel Aviv University’s Shlomo Sand published a book called “The Invention off the Jewish People,” he was widely called anti-Semitic. When Adelson says the same about Palestinians, he’s a Republican rock star.

This is an example of what the Elder calls the "Assumed Symmetry Fallacy."

 

He writes:

I am not a logician and do not know of a formal name for this fallacy, but let’s call it the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy: the assumption that two sides – by virtue of their opposition – are falsely assumed to be symmetric.

This is a very important insight and one that we need to consider and discuss.  The western world tends to think of the Arab war against the Jews as a matter of symmetry.  They use terms like “cycles of violence” or the “Israel-Palestine” conflict, both of which suggest a symmetry of power and hostility.

 

This is not merely a matter of false analogy, as one of his commenters suggests, but of a systemic bias against the Jewish minority in the Middle East via medias and governments throughout the world.  It is a bias in which it generally suggested that the Jewish minority deserves a good beating because we are mean to the “Palestinians.”

 

The Jews of the Middle East, via the State of Israel, are now a powerful people and we should be very proud, as Jews and friends of the Jewish State, of their accomplishments. The success of Israel is nothing short of remarkable, given its humble beginnings. Israel has the most powerful military in the entire region and one of the best economies, given its relative size, of any country in the world. Israel is creative, innovative, technological, internationally-minded, and sophisticated.

 

However, the Jews of the Middle East also represent a tiny minority surrounded by a much larger, hostile majority of Muslims who have made it very clear, over the long and brutal course of 1,400 years, that they simply will not stand for Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land and will do everything within their power to make life miserable for the Jewish minority. They teach their children that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs and that killing Jewish people is pleasing in the sight of Allah. They wage war against us. They shoot rockets at us. They strap suicide belts onto women and children because when Muslim women and children commit suicide in an effort to murder Jews it is considered not merely a noble act, but the most noble spiritual act of the shaheed.

 

The truth of the matter is that in the Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East, there is no symmetry. In terms of numbers, resources, land mass, every advantage goes to the Arabs. They outnumber the Jews by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1 throughout the region. They conquered and control over 99% of the entire Middle East, with the sole exception of the Jewish State of Israel, and are driving Christians out of the region entirely. They hold all non-Muslims under submission to Islam within the system of dhimmitude since the rise of that religion in the 7th century.

 

And now they literally create a brand-spanking new people, the “Palestinians,” for the distinct purpose of countering Jewish sovereignty and freedom on historically Jewish land. So, no, there is no symmetry in this fight.

 

The Jews are fighting to maintain freedom and sovereignty and the great Arab majority is dedicated to destroying that freedom and sovereignty and will ruin their own cousins, the Palestinian-Arabs, in order to keep them as the dagger pointed at the heart of the Jewish people on Jewish land.

 

Peter Beinart, it should be noted, is perhaps the single foremost example of Jewish dhimmitude in the public square today. He represents an excellent example of the kind of Jewish "progressive" who cannot only not bring himself to take his own side in a fight, but who has so incorporated the "Palestinian narrative" of pristine victim-hood into his understanding of the conflict that he honestly believes that the besieged Jewish minority in the Middle East are the aggressors upon their former Arab-Muslim masters.

 

Finally, and most importantly, the Elder is generally correct when he writes this:

The Palestinian Arabs are a recently invented people. They exist today, to be sure, but they were not a “people” before 1948 at the very earliest. Westerners who drew the borders after World War I created what today's Palestinian Arabs laughably call “historic Palestine” – arbitrary lines that surrounded a people who had as much in common with those across those lines as with those within them. Arabs in the Galilee had more in common with those in Damascus than those in Bethlehem. Tribes and families trumped geography (and they often still do.) They became a “people” because of how their Arab brethren refused to allow them to integrate into their countries, forcing them to suffer as a separate group that eventually did turn them into a people. Arabs themselves admit freely that they kept Palestinian Arabs in miserable conditions in order to foster their nascent “unity.”

And that, of course, is his primary point concerning the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy. The Jews have been a people for over 3,500 years and perhaps considerably longer. Among the peoples of the earth the Jews, along with the Chinese and other indigenous peoples, are among the oldest on the planet. Jews are also, along with native Americans, for example, among the most persecuted. The Palestinian-Arabs, by contrast, only emerged as an allegedly distinct people toward the end of the twentieth-century and did so for the specific purpose of beating up on the Jews.

 

And I suppose this is where I disagree with the Elder. Are the “Palestinians” a distinct and separate people from Jordanian Arabs or Syrian Arabs or Egyptian Arabs? The classical definition of nationhood would suggest not. So-called “Palestinians” share the same religion with other Arabs, the same food-stuffs, generally speaking, with other Arabs, the same language and traditions. The “Palestinians” are Arabs. Period. And, in fact, most of them immigrated into the area following the Jewish aliyahs around the turn of the century.

 

The Jewish people are under no obligation to recognize a brand-new allegedly distinct people who came into existence for the explicit purpose of robbing the tiny Jewish minority of sovereignty on Jewish land.

 

The truth of the matter is that we owe them nothing.

 

If this sounds rather harsh, I am sorry, but the “Palestinians” have turned down every single offer for a state in peace next to Israel since 1937. They are never going to accept a Jewish presence with autonomy on land that was once captured by the forces of Islam, because to do so contradicts the very reason that they came into existence as an allegedly distinct ethnicity to begin with.

 

What the Elder understands, and what Beinart clearly does not, is that there is no symmetry. Shlomo Sand is a racist and a traitor to his people. The very notion that the Jews are a recently invented people is historically preposterous and Sand is a fraud. Adelson, however, whatever one may make of his politics, was correct if he suggested that the “Palestinians” are a newly invented people.

 

This is not a matter of opinion.

 

It is a matter of fact.

Caroline Glick’s One-State Mideast Solution Won’t Work. By Peter Berkowitz.

A One-State Mideast Solution? It Won’t Work. By Peter Berkowitz. Real Clear Politics, April 3, 2014.

To my colleague Caroline, a caveat. By Martin Sherman. Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2014.

Twelve Questions About the “Peace Process.” By Rick Richman.

Twelve Questions About the “Peace Process.” By Rick Richman. Commentary, April 2, 2014.

The Story of the Jews, Episodes 3, 4, and 5. By Simon Schama.

The Story of the Jews. By Simon Schama. Video. PBS. Episodes 3, 4, and 5.

The Story of the Jews, Episodes 1 and 2. By Simon Schama.

The Story of the Jews. By Simon Schama. Video. PBS. Episodes 1 and 2.

Fembots Have Feelings Too: An Interview with Amy Purdy. By Brian Merchant.

Amy Purdy. Paralympics photoshoot.

Fembots Have Feelings Too: An Interview with Amy Purdy. By Brian Merchant. Motherboard, December 6, 2012.

Amy Purdy, Paralympian and Dancing Contestant. By K.S. Wang. Motor Trend, March 13, 2014,

Through the Eyes of a Fembot: Amy Purdy website.

“Borderline miraculous”: Amy Purdy leaves Dancing With The Stars audience and judges in tears with inspirational story. Daily Mail, April 1, 2014.

Amy Purdy Gets Leg Jokes Out of the Way. Video. Jimmy Kimmel Live, April 2, 2014. YouTube. Also at IMDb. Hulu.

Amy Purdy Gives Amazing Performance on Dancing with the Stars. Gossip Cop, March 31, 2014.

Amy Purdy Cracks Jokes at Herself on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Video. Lauren Solomon, April 2, 2014. YouTube. Also at AOL TV Replay, and here.

Amy Purdy: Greeting adversity. Video. poptech, December 11, 2012. YouTube. Also at Pop Tech.

Living Beyond Limits: Amy Purdy at TEDxOrangeCoast. Video. TEDx Talks, June 8, 2011. YouTube. Also at TED.

Amy Purdy and Mark Balas: Salsa (Dancing with the Stars 2014 week 4). Video. DWTS Vault, April 8, 2014. YouTube. Also here.

Amy Purdy and Derek Hough: Contemporary (Dancing with the Stars 2014 week 3). Video. DWTS Vault, April 1, 2014. YouTube. Also here.

Amy Purdy and Derek Hough: Swing (Dancing with the Stars 2014 week 2). Video. dancingwts09, March 24, 2014. YouTube. Also here.

Amy Purdy and Derek Hough: Cha-cha-cha (Dancing with the Stars 2014 week 1). Video DWTS Vault, March 18, 2014. YouTube. Also here.

On My Own Two Feet: Amy Purdy website.


Amy Purdy is a Jacksonian pioneer on a new frontier. She shows the same grit and heroic spirit of those Jacksonian pioneer women who took the risk to settle an untamed land and build a new nation.

Judaism, Christianity, and Environmentalism. By Dennis Prager.

Judaism, Christianity, and Environmentalism. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, April 1, 2014. Also at DennisPrager.com.

Prager:

As I have often noted, the most dynamic and influential religion of the past hundred years has not been Christianity, let alone Judaism, the two religions that created the Western world. Nor has it been Islam. It has been Leftism.

 

Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion has. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.

 

For most of that time, various incarnations of Marxism have been the dominant expressions, and motivators, of Leftism: specifically, income redistribution, material equality, and socialism. They are still powerful aspects of the Left, but with the downfall of most Communist regimes, other left-wing expressions have generated even more passion: first feminism and then environmentalism.

 

Nothing comes close to environmentalism in generating left-wing enthusiasm. It is the religion of our time. For the Left, the earth has supplanted patriotism. This was largely inevitable in Europe, given its contempt for nationalism since the end of World War I and even more so since World War II. But it is now true for the elites (almost all of whose members are leftists) in America as well.

 

This was most graphically displayed by the infamous Time magazine cover of April 21, 2008, which altered the most iconic photograph in American history — Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Instead of the American flag, the Time cover depicted the Marines planting a tree. The caption on the cover read, “How to Win the War on Global Warming.” In other words, just as German and Japanese Fascism was the enemy in World War II, global warming is the enemy today. And instead of allegiance to the nation’s flag, now our allegiance must be to nature.

 

This is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian view of the world that has dominated Western civilization for all of the West’s history. The Judeo-Christian worldview is that man is at the center of the universe; nature was therefore created for man. Nature has no intrinsic worth other than man’s appreciation and moral use of it.

 

Worship of nature was the pagan worldview, a worship that the Hebrew Bible was meant to destroy. The messages of the Creation story in Genesis were that:

 

1) God created nature. God is not in nature, and nature is not God. Nature is nothing more than His handiwork. Therefore, it is He, not nature, that is to be worshipped. The pagan world held nature in esteem; its gods were gods of nature (they were not above nature).

 

2) Nature cannot be worshipped because nature is amoral, whereas God is moral.

 

3) All of creation had one purpose: the final creation, the human being.

 

With the demise of the biblical religions that have provided the American people with their core values since the country’s inception, we are reverting to the pagan worldview. Trees and animals are venerated, while man is simply one more animal in the ecosystem. And he is largely a hindrance, not an asset.

 

On February 20, a pit bull attacked a four-year-old boy, Kevin Vicente, leaving the boy with a broken eye socket and a broken jaw. Kevin will have to undergo months, perhaps years, of reconstructive surgeries. A Facebook page was set up to raise funds. But it wasn’t set up for Kevin. It was set up for the dog. The “Save Mickey” page garnered more than 70,000 “likes” and raised more than enough money to provide legal help to prevent the dog from being euthanized. There were even candlelight vigils and a YouTube plea for the dog.

 

The nonprofit legal group defending Mickey is the Lexus Project. According to CBS News, “the same group fought earlier this year for the life of a dog that fatally mauled a toddler in Nevada.”

 

This is the trend: Nature over man.

 

This is why environmentalists oppose the Keystone pipeline: Nature over man. The pipeline will provide work for thousands of people, and it will greatly increase the energy independence of Canada and the United States. But to the true believers who make up much of the environmentalist movement, none of that matters — just as they didn’t care about the millions of Africans who died of malaria as a result of the environmentalists’ successful efforts to ban DDT.

 

One of the fathers of environmentalism is John Lovelock, the scientist who originated the Gaia hypothesis of the earth as a single living organism. Sunday, a writer for The Guardian reported that Lovelock now has a few criticisms of the movement he helped start: “Talking about the environmental movement, Lovelock says: ‘It’s become a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.’” Some of us wonder if the latest IPCC report doesn’t worry too much about facts.

 

Lovelock also told the interviewer “that he had been too certain about the rate of global warming in his past book . . . that fracking and nuclear power should power the UK, not renewable sources such as windfarms.”

 

As G. K. Chesterton prophesied over a hundred years ago: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”

 

Now it’s the environment.

Cold War Again: Who’s Responsible? By Stephen F. Cohen.

Cold War Again: Who’s Responsible? By Stephen F. Cohen. The Nation, April 1, 2014.

Meet Stephen F. Cohen, Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend in the American Media. By Cathy Young. The Daily Beast, March 16, 2014.

Why the Palestinians Have No Excuse Not to Recognize the Jewish State. By Adi Schwartz.

Why the Palestinians have no excuse not to recognize the Jewish state. By Adi Schwartz. i24 News, April 1, 2014.

Bashing Netanyahu Won’t Bring Peace Any Closer. By Jeff Jacoby. NJBR, March 8, 2014.


Schwartz:

It is now clear that of the many issues on the table in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is perhaps the most contentious one. So much so, that the Arab League included an absolute rejection of such recognition in the closing declaration of its annual summit last week.

 

While it seems a theoretical issue, with no practical meaning, it could still wreck the entire negotiating process. But why? How come acknowledging Israel’s nature (which Secretary John Kerry has rightly pointed out was recognized by the international community back in the Partition Plan of 1947) is so difficult for the Arab side? Does it really have to be so difficult?

 

From the Israeli perspective, it is a justified and legitimate request. If Israel is expected to give up strategic territory and bring its border as close as 22 kilometers from its main metropolis, it has to be assured in return that a peace agreement with the Palestinians puts an end to all future demands. If the Arab side continues to dream about dismantling the Jewish state—and to act accordingly—it makes no sense for Israel to give up territory.

 

The undermining of the post-agreement Jewish state can be achieved either by attempts to flood it with Palestinian refugees and their descendants, or by fomenting unrest and demanding autonomy and later on independence for the Arab minority inside Israel, or by sheer force.

 

Only a crystal clear message from the Arab side that the conflict is over, merits ceding territory. Such a clear message means acknowledging that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and will remain so.

 

Arab officials, however, have raised concerns. They correctly observed that such recognition would mean accepting the Israeli narrative regarding Jewish rights over some of the land. Indeed, a peace agreement and a process of reconciliation would necessitate an update of the Arab narrative that views the entire land as exclusively Arab and Muslim.

 

But since the Jewish narrative evolved along the years, so can the Palestinian narrative change. Back in 1919, when Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, laid out Zionism's claims in Versailles, the map he presented included all the territory west of the River Jordan (and areas in today's Lebanon). Jews saw the entire land as theirs, but as soon as 1937, the Zionist movement was ready to accept less than that vision.

 

The same process of Israeli accommodation can be traced in its views regarding a Palestinian independent state, which was anathema to the Israeli leadership until late in the 1980s. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir even famously said that there was no such thing as a “Palestinian people.” In the last 15 years, however, all Israeli prime ministers have accepted, reluctantly or not, the notion of a Palestinian sovereign state in the territories.

 

Another Palestinian argument against recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is that it would jeopardize the status of the Arab minority in Israel. But a Palestinian recognition would not damage nor improve their status. The Palestinian leadership was never the custodian of the Israeli Arabs’ rights; in fact, their rights as minority members are protected in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, in Israeli law and in court rulings. Regardless of Palestinian recognition, Israel sees itself as a Jewish state, which didn’t prevent it from preserving the rights of its Arab citizens. In other words, Palestinian recognition is needed for the bilateral relations with Israel, but will have no effect on Israel’s domestic issues.

 

Last but not least, Palestinian officials claim that recognition would mean giving up their demand that millions of refugees and their descendants return to Israel. That is absolutely true: Palestinians must decide whether they want to replace the post-agreement Israel with yet another Arab state, or to live peacefully side by side next to Israel. If their choice is the latter, they should have no problem resettling the refugees and their descendants elsewhere. And in that case, they should have no problem in recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Only such recognition would mean that the conflict is over.

Russia is Remaking Itself as the Leader of the Anti-Western World. By Masha Gessen.

Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world. By Masha Gessen. Washington Post, March 30, 2014. Also here.

Gessen:

“This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” President Obama said Wednesday in Brussels, presenting the post-Crimea world order as he sees it after consultations with other NATO leaders. “After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.”

 

President Vladimir Putin would surely beg to differ. Over the past two years, a new ideology has taken shape at the Kremlin. Insistently pushed out over the airwaves of state-controlled television, it has taken hold as Russia’s national idea — and is the driving force behind its newly aggressive international posture. Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.

 

During his annual state-of-the-federation address to parliament in December, Putin articulated this ideology. This in itself was novel: For his preceding 13 years at the helm, Putin had stuck to the pragmatic in his speeches. Now he was putting forth a vision for which many Russians had longed in the nearly quarter-century since the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving a giant hole where its citizens’ identities used to be.

 

In his December speech, Putin said that Russia had no superpower ambitions in the sense of “a claim to global or regional hegemony.” Yet, he said, “We will strive to be leaders.” In explaining Russia’s new identity with relationship to the West and its claim on leadership, he said:

 

“This is absolutely objective and understandable for a state like Russia, with its great history and culture, with many centuries of experience not of so-called tolerance, neutered and barren, but of the real organic life of different peoples existing together within the framework of a single state.” Putin was placing Russia’s very approach to life in opposition to the Western one. The “so-called tolerance” he mentioned as the key feature of Western civilization is, from this perspective, nothing but a slide into immorality. More likely than not, that includes homosexuality, which is why tolerance is described as “barren and neutered.”

 

“Today many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures,” he continued. “Society is now required not only to recognize everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning.”

 

Finally, said Putin, it was time to resist this scourge of tolerance and diversity creeping in from the West. “We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values,” he asserted. Russia’s role is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

 

In short, Putin intends to save the world from the West. He has started with Crimea. When he says he is protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine, he means he is protecting them from the many terrible things that come from the West. A few days after the December address, Alexei Pushkov, head of the Duma committee on foreign relations, defined that threat on the floor of the chamber: “European Union advisers in practically every ministry of any significance, control over the flow of finances and over national programs, and a broadening of the sphere of gay culture, which has become the European Union’s official policy.”

 

Three months later, this is exactly how Russians see the events in Ukraine: The West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels.

 

Now, Russia is not leading a bloc of nations in this new anti-Western crusade — at least, not yet. But it is certainly not alone in its longing for “traditional values.” Russia has been assembling an informal “traditional values” bloc in the United Nations, where the Human Rights Council has passed a series of Russian-sponsored resolutions opposing gay rights over the past three years. Russia’s allies in passing these resolutions include not only its post-Soviet neighbors but also China, Ecuador, Malaysia and more than a dozen other states.

 

The anti-gay agenda may seem like a thin basis for forming a militant international alliance of state-actors, but it has great unifying potential when framed in terms of a broader anti-Western effort and, indeed, a civilizational mission.

 

That mission, rather than the mere desire to bite off a piece of a neighboring country, is the driving force behind Putin’s new war — and the reason the Russian public supports it so strongly. This war, they hope, will make Russia not only bigger but also make it great again.

Masha Gessen

The Employer’s Creed. By David Brooks.

The Employer’s Creed. By David Brooks. New York Times, March 31, 2014.

Spare Us the Gamal Abdel Nasser Imagery. By Rami G. Khouri.

Spare Us the Gamal Abdel Nasser Imagery. By Rami G. Khouri. The Daily Star [Lebanon], March 29, 2014.

The President’s Foreign Policy Paradox. By Walter Russell Mead.

The President’s Foreign Policy Paradox. By Walter Russell Mead. Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2014.

Mr. Putin’s Revealing Speech. By Peggy Noonan.

Mr. Putin’s Revealing Speech. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2014.

Obama vs. Putin: The Mismatch. By Charles Krauthammer.

Obama vs. Putin: The Mismatch. By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, March 27, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Krauthammer:

“The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the Cold War.”

 

— Barack Obama, March 24

 

Should. Lovely sentiment. As lovely as what Obama said five years ago to the United Nations: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.”

 

That’s the kind of sentiment you expect from a Miss America contestant asked to name her fondest wish, not from the leader of the free world explaining his foreign policy.

 

The East Europeans know they inhabit the battleground between the West and a Russia that wants to return them to its sphere of influence. Ukrainians see tens of thousands of Russian troops across their border and know they are looking down the barrel of quite a zero-sum game.

 

Obama thinks otherwise. He says that Vladimir Putin’s kind of neo-imperialist thinking is a relic of the past — and advises Putin to transcend the Cold War.

 

Good God. Putin hasn’t transcended the Russian revolution. Did no one give Obama a copy of Putin’s speech last week upon the annexation of Crimea? Putin railed not only at Russia’s loss of empire in the 1990s. He went back to the 1920s: “After the revolution, the Bolsheviks . . . may God judge them, added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine.” Putin was referring not to Crimea (which came two sentences later) but to his next potential target: Kharkiv and Donetsk and the rest of southeastern Ukraine.

 

Putin’s irredentist grievances go very deep. Obama seems unable to fathom them. Asked whether he’d misjudged Russia, whether it really is our greatest geopolitical foe, he disdainfully replied that Russia is nothing but “a regional power” acting “out of weakness.”

 

Where does one begin? Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan were also regional powers, yet managed to leave behind at least 50 million dead. And yes, Russia should be no match for the American superpower. Yet under this president, Russia has run rings around America, from the attempted ingratiation of the “reset” to America’s empty threats of “consequences” were Russia to annex Crimea.

 

Annex Crimea it did. For which the “consequences” have been risible. Numberless 19th- and 20th-century European soldiers died for Crimea. Putin conquered it in a swift and stealthy campaign that took three weeks and cost his forces not a sprained ankle. That’s “weakness”?

 

Indeed, Obama’s dismissal of Russia as a regional power makes his own leadership of the one superpower all the more embarrassing. For seven decades since the Japanese surrender, our role under eleven presidents had been as offshore balancer protecting smaller allies from potential regional hegemons.

 

What are the allies thinking now? Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and other Pacific Rim friends are wondering where this America will be as China expands its reach and claims. The Gulf states are near panic as they see America playacting nuclear negotiations with Iran that, at best, will leave their mortal Shiite enemy just weeks away from the bomb.

 

America never sought the role that history gave it after World War II to bear unbidden burdens “to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” as movingly described by John Kennedy. We have an appropriate aversion to the stark fact that the alternative to U.S. leadership is either global chaos or dominance by the likes of China, Russia, and Iran.

 

But Obama doesn’t even seem to recognize this truth. In his major Brussels address Wednesday, the very day Russia seized the last Ukrainian naval vessel in Crimea, Obama made vague references to further measures should Russia march deeper into Ukraine, while still emphasizing the centrality of international law, international norms, and international institutions like the United Nations.

 

Such fanciful thinking will leave our allies with two choices: bend a knee — or arm to the teeth. Either acquiesce to the regional bully or gird your loins, i.e., go nuclear. As surely will the Gulf states. As will, in time, Japan and South Korea.

 

Even Ukrainians are expressing regret at having given up their nukes in return for paper guarantees of territorial integrity. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum was ahead of its time — the perfect example of the kind of advanced 21st-century thinking so cherished by our president. Perhaps the captain of that last Ukrainian vessel should have waved the document at the Russian fleet that took his ship.

Obama’s 21st-Century Power Politics. By Fareed Zakaria.

Obama’s 21st-century power politics. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, March 27, 2014. Also here.

Zakaria:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought to the fore an important debate about what kind of world we live in. Many critics charge that the Obama administration has been blind to its harsh realities because it believes, as the Wall Street Journal opined, in “a fantasy world of international rules.” John McCain declared that “this is the most naive president in history.” The Post’s editorial board worried that President Obama misunderstands “the nature of the century we’re living in.”

 

Almost all of these critics have ridiculed Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that changing borders by force, as Russia did, is 19th-century behavior in the 21st century. Well, here are the facts. Scholar Mark Zacher has tallied up changes of borders by force, something that was once quite common. Since World War I, he notes, that practice has sharply declined, and in recent decades, that decline has accelerated. Before 1950, wars between nations resulted in border changes (annexations) about 80 percent of the time. After 1950, that number dropped to 27 percent. In fact, since 1946, there have been only 12 examples of major changes in borders using force — and all of them before 1976. So Putin’s behavior, in fact, does belong to the 19th century.

 

The transformation of international relations goes well beyond border changes. Harvard’s Steven Pinker has collected war data in his superb book The Better Angels of Our Nature. In a more recent essay, he points out that “after a 600-year stretch in which Western European countries started two new wars a year, they have not started one since 1945. Nor have the 40 or so richest nations anywhere in the world engaged each other in armed conflict.” Colonial wars, a routine feature of international life for thousands of years, are extinct. Wars between countries — not just major powers, not just in Europe — have also dropped dramatically, by more than 50 percent over the past three decades. Scholars at the University of Maryland have found that the past decade has seen the lowest number of new conflicts since World War II.

 

Many aspects of international life remain nasty and brutish, and it is easy to sound tough and suggest that you understand the hard realities of power politics. But the most astonishing, remarkable reality about the world is how much things have changed, especially since 1945.

 

It is ironic that the Wall Street Journal does not recognize this new world because it was created in substantial part through capitalism and free trade. Twenty years ago, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, as hardheaded a statesman as I have ever met, told me that Asian countries had seen the costs of war and the fruits of economic interdependence and development — and that they would not choose the former over the latter.

 

This is not an academic debate. The best way to deal with Russia’s aggression in Crimea is not to present it as routine and national interest-based foreign policy that will be countered by Washington in a contest between two great powers. It is to point out, as Obama did eloquently this week in Brussels, that Russia is grossly endangering a global order that has benefited the entire world.

 

Compare what the Obama administration has managed to organize in the wake of this latest Russian aggression to the Bush administration’s response to Putin’s actions in Georgia in 2008. That was a blatant invasion. Moscow sent in tanks and heavy artillery; hundreds were killed, nearly 200,000 displaced. Yet the response was essentially nothing. This time, it has been much more serious. Some of this difference is in the nature of the stakes, but it might also have to do with the fact that the Obama administration has taken pains to present Russia’s actions in a broader context and get other countries to see them as such.

 

You can see a similar pattern with Iran. The Bush administration largely pressured that country bilaterally. The Obama administration was able to get much more effective pressure because it presented Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to global norms of nonproliferation, persuaded the other major powers to support sanctions, enacted them through the United Nations and thus ensured that they were comprehensive and tight. This is what leadership looks like in the 21st century.

 

There is an evolving international order with new global norms making war and conquest increasingly rare. We should strengthen, not ridicule, it. Yes, some places stand in opposition to this trend — North Korea, Syria, Russia. The people running these countries believe that they are charting a path to greatness and glory. But they are the ones living in a fantasy world.