Niall Ferguson: This is what happens if China wins the new cold war

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping. AP

 

The winter of a new cold war is coming between the US and China, renowned Hoover Institution and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson warned The Australian Financial Review Business Summit this week.

Winning it might decide the 2020 US election. Losing it might be the end of a US dollar-dominated global financial system, if not worse. That’s very scary coming from the man who called the scale of the Soviet communist collapse in 1989 and the US mortgage implosion two years early in 2006.

Will China Rule The World?

(Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

China’s worldwide influence campaign requires a coordinated response from all segments of American society—not just politicians and policy-makers.

No bilateral relationship in the world is more important than that between the United States and China, and it is now undergoing an epochal transformation. For three and half decades after Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nightmare and opened up China to markets and modernization in the late 1970s, American policymakers and scholars believed that engagement with China would lead that system to become at least a little more like us. Economically, China would become more of an open, market economy. Politically, China would become more of an open and pluralistic (if not democratic) society. Internationally, China would become what Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick urged it to be in a famous 2005 speech: a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs.

Opinion: Why is the EU so vindictive about Brexit?

Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator for Brexit, says the British are going backwards in exit talks with the EU.

 

Voluntary withdrawal from the EU treaty does not have to be painful

In case you’re wondering where the belligerent spirit went that pushed Europe into centuries of warfare, two major conflicts last century, numerous regional skirmishes in recent decades, and a Cold War lasting nearly half a century, rest assured it is alive and well, albeit channeled into a “peaceful” version in the European Union’s remorseless vindictiveness.

After brutalizing Greece for lying to join the euro and then daring to violate the strictures of membership, the EU has now turned its focus to punishing Britain for having the audacity to reject the stifling bureaucracy of Brussels and the increasingly assertive dominance of Berlin.

Mattis: ISIS ‘couldn’t last 2 minutes in fight with our troops’

Defense secretary nominee Gen. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis believes ISIS is “al-Qaida on steroids” and must be defeated in head-to-head “battles of annihilation” that leave “no survivors” on the enemy side, according to a recent discussion he participated in with a conservative think tank.

…

Mattis made the eye-opening remarks in a little-noticed interview with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, Calif., where he is a visiting fellow.

The KGB Ran the World’s Largest Programme for Individual Behaviour Modification

Just forty years ago this week, on 31 October 1975, KGB chairman Yurii Andropov made a “top secret” report to the members of the Central Committee of the ruling Soviet Communist Party. Andropov had a simple message: In the war on anti-Soviet activity, he said, we are winning.

Andropov began by pointing to a steep decline in the number of prosecutions for state crimes such as treason and anti-Soviet agitation—from more than 1,300 a year at the end of the 1950s to less than half that number in the early 1970s. But what factors were driving this success? Andropov proposed four explanations:

The further reinforcement of the moral-political unity of our society; the growth of political consciousness of Soviet people; the correct penal policy of the Soviet state; and the dominant role of preventive-warning work to deter criminality (my emphasis).

‘Huge surge’ of ‘unscreened’ Muslims flooding U.S.

You don’t make a ‘mistake’ of this magnitude by mistake. All things of this proportion are deliberate and/or intentional. The underlying issue is the motive.

Please see the source link for the WND/Radio America interview with Paul Sperry.

 

Feds ‘admit, under oath, that they have no idea who these people are’

Muslim immigration from dangerous nations is dramatically higher in recent years, and government assurances that immigrants are being properly screened is “a farce,” according to accomplished author and columnist Paul Sperry.

“It’s a huge surge under Obama. In the last three years, he’s averaged 100,000 new immigrants from Muslim nations a year. That is very alarming. It’s more than we’re importing both from Central America and Mexico combined.

‘Once a Spy, Always a Spy’

How Putin’s KGB past shapes his autocratic rule

It was January of 1990, and a middle-aged, overweight Vladimir Putin was depressed.

Working as a paper-pushing KGB intelligence officer in Dresden, Germany, Putin spent most of his time attempting to recruit undercover foreign agents and writing reports. News from back home in the Soviet Union caused great concern.

Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to the head of the Communist Party and was pushing liberalizing policies, and by 1989 the KGB leadership had begun to back some of his reforms. Hundreds of thousands protested in the streets of Communist East Germany for reunification—culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November.

On January 15, 1990, protesters stormed the Stasi state security building where Putin worked in Dresden. Putin called for military assistance, but it only arrived hours later after approval from Moscow. Moscow had kept him waiting.