Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance By Michael Sobolik (Naval Institute Press, 161 pages, $22) Sometimes small books can have big impacts — one thinks of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Halford Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, Norman Podhoretz’s The Present Danger, and, more recently, Robert Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind. Michael Sobolik’s Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance is a mere 161 pages of text, but if policymakers in Washington read it and broadly follow its suggestions, the United States may be in a better position to ultimately prevail in our current Cold War with China.  READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific Sobolik is a senior fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council who previously served on the staff of Sen. Ted Cruz. China’s “great game” that the United States needs to counter, he writes, is its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which he rightly describes as a geopolitical offensive to extend China’s influence throughout Eurasia and beyond. Sobolik invokes Mackinder in warning that President Xi Jinping’s goal is to supplant the U.S. as “the dominant force across the entirety of Eurasia” and to extend its political influence to Africa to achieve predominance on what Mackinder called the “World-Island” (Eurasia-Africa). The BRI, he writes, is designed to “unite[] Eurasia on China’s terms.”  Sobolik explains that Xi’s BRI began with both a land and maritime component (the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road) but has since expanded to include a Digital Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, and Health Silk Road. Sobolik also places the BRI in the context of China’s imperial past — its history of geopolitical expansion long before it was governed by the Communist Party. China, he writes, has its own unique “strategic culture” that dates back to at least 221 B.C., when the Qin unified China under one emperor under the “Mandate of Heaven.” Under the successor Han dynasty, Chinese rulers embraced the ideology of “imperial Confucianism,” which included a “quest for hegemony.” “While dynasties rose and fell,” Sobolik writes, “China continued to expand its borders and colonize its neighbors in pursuit of heaven’s mandate.” The CCP, he explains, has continued that strategic culture. Sobolik’s analysis of the sources of Chinese strategic culture is reminiscent of George Kennan’s famous “X” article, which in 1947 traced the sources of Soviet conduct to Russia’s imperial past. Kennan wrote that Soviet foreign policy derived from a combination of Russian strategic culture and communist ideology. The same is true of China. The BRI is today’s version of China as the “Middle Kingdom,” the center of the world with other nations as part of a “tribute system.” China seeks a “sinocentric world,” which can only come about with America’s decline. The BRI is the geopolitical offensive designed to usher in that sinocentric world order. Sobolik views China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea, western Pacific Ocean, and Indian Ocean as a direct challenge to American sea power. China’s extension of the BRI to Africa, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere indicates that China’s “manifest destiny” is global in nature. Sobolik notes that China claims a Monroe Doctrine–like exclusivity in the western Pacific while simultaneously seeking to undermine the U.S. Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. American policymakers who view the BRI as simply an infrastructure and economic program instead of an “imperial project” misread China’s goals and will likely fail to formulate and implement policies designed to counter it. For far too long, Sobolik writes, the United States engaged China as a result of a “triumphalist hangover” after winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Western political leaders thought China was abandoning communism and would integrate into the “rules-based international order.” Western businessmen invested heavily in China, helping to fuel its economic and military rise. Some of that hangover endures as the Biden administration attempts both to engage and compete with China. There is no policymaker in the current administration who is sympathetic to Sobolik’s proposed Reaganite approach of implementing a “whole of government” approach to countering China’s imperial designs. Sobolik suggests that we need to end our fixation with the Middle East and Ukraine — they are of secondary importance compared to China. That means not ending assistance to Israel or Ukraine but instead prioritizing our struggle with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He acknowledges the need to win the military balance vis-à-vis China, but by itself that will not bring victory without war. We need to attack the BRI at its source by sanctioning Chinese companies and conducting effective public diplomacy against the CCP and its human rights abuses. We should pour more resources into “information warfare” by working to pierce China’s internet firewall and censorship regime. We should exploit the vulnerabilities of the BRI and undermine CCP rule in China. Like Reagan, we need a president and a national security team who will seek victory without war — “we win, they lose.”    The post Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If ever there were a snapshot of serious political message being sent, it would be that coming from the estimated 100,000 Americans who gathered this past Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, to hear and cheer on former President Donald Trump. Trump’s detractors called the attendees a cult, which is not only designed to insult but also wrong. What was in evidence in vivid fashion in Wildwood — in decidedly blue-state New Jersey — can only be described as a movement. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: The Pennsylvania Chase Is On: An Interview With Cliff Maloney American history has seen movements before. Most prominently there was the “civil rights movement” of the 1960s. It existed because millions of Americans came to see that black Americans were being deliberately discriminated against. They were not allowed to vote, to prosper economically, or to share in what was known as “the American Dream.” The civil rights movement demanded change — and, in time, it got it. So, too, were the anti-Vietnam War protests a movement, one that wound up having a serious impact on the 1968 election and ending the presidency of the once popular Democrat President Lyndon Johnson. The base of the Trump movement is, unsurprisingly, motivated in part by economics. For example, contrary to the blatant lie Joe Biden likes to tell, inflation was not 9 percent when he took over from Trump. It was 1.4 percent. As FactCheck.org notes, under Biden: Inflation surged to its highest level in over 40 years. Despite recent moderation, consumer prices are up nearly 19% overall. Gasoline is up 54%. Yet even those dismal economic numbers are not enough to inspire the passion seen on vivid display in Wildwood. There is something else at work — a big something else. It is, safe to say, cultural. It’s symbolized by a decided contempt for average Americans and the values they hold dear. This would include patriotism. Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. writes: In affluent neighborhoods around Washington, New York and Los Angeles — and, for that matter, Paris, London and Berlin — it’s common to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves…. Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries. Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening. It should not have taken the Brexit referendum victory, the election of Donald Trump and the nationalist surges in Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and Scandinavia to bring home the cost of these regional inequalities. Bingo. It is exactly that “enormous divide” that “has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries” that drove 100,000 Americans to show up en masse to cheer on Donald Trump in, of all places, blue-state New Jersey. And it’s safe to say that these Americans are decidedly angry at seeing the former president repeatedly targeted by the lawfare establishment of the nation’s elites and forced to sit for endless hours in a courtroom while trumped up (so to speak) charges are hurled against him. It may amaze some that a New York Republican billionaire would receive such passionate support from working-class and blue-collar Americans. They forget that Trump’s parents raised him in an environment that had him spending lots of time at his father’s construction sites teeming with hard hats, a sea of blue-collar construction workers. He knows then — and he knows them well. And, in his heart of heart, he considers himself to be one of them. America has seen this before — in 1980 with another Republican with a working-class background, who grew up to be not simply a movie and TV star but the seven-times head of the union for working actors — the Screen Actors Guild. Like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan got working Americans — and they got him. As former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Monday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, there has been a shift of the political tectonic plates, with a slow, steady move away from the political left. And the results of that shift were on vivid display 100,000 Americans strong at this past Saturday’s Trump rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. As the November elections grow closer. The post Trump and the Significance of the Wildwood Rally appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As Sheryl Crow airs her most socially charged songs yet on new album Evolution, she looks back on her long and winding road

Michael Cohen testified today, but the big moment never came. He had an audio of a conversation with Donald Trump discussing paying off hooker Karen McDougal. That’s not a crime. One witness, a worker at the Trump organization, admitted on the stand that he decided to label the payments as legal payments. Cohen is a […] The post Screenshot of the Trump Trial After Michael Cohen’s Testimony appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

'approximately 60 images of AI-generated child pornography'