Geopolitics

In the new year: Flashpoints, elections, humanitarian crises

Looking into the snow globe, it’s that time of year to predict and prognosticate what awaits this tired world in the New Year. There’s a certain trepidation in the air as we view the current and emerging crises, especially during a highly contested election year in so many key countries. Read More.

Xi wanrs people of China: Don't badmouth the economy

China's Ministry of State Security took to the WeChat social network recently to warn against "cliches that denigrate the Chinese economy." Read More.

El Hierro island test drives climate gods' 100% renewables

In 2015, the island of El Hierro, the second-smallest and farthest-south and -west of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa, set out to be 100 percent powered by wind and hydroelectric pumped storage. Read More.

North Korea in a league of its own for missile proliferation

There they go again! North Korea’s reclusive communist regime ended the year with a provocative intercontinental ballistic launch, flying near Japan and splashing down in the Pacific. Read More.

No cash, no troops, no ammo: Zelensky faces political oblivion

Two years into the war against Russia, the funding spigot to Ukraine from the West has been essentially turned off. Read More.

China planned to engineer at-sea Taiwan helicopter defection

During the Cold War, high profile defections from the Soviet bloc to the West were a constant source of assurance of the desirability, if not the superiority of the democracies over the empire of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Read More.

N. Korea lost all interest in U.S. diplomacy after Trump exit

North Korea has not engaged with the United States since President Donald Trump left the White House, the top U.S. East Asia official in the Biden Administration told Congress. Read More.

With dissent banned, Hong Kong has lowest ever voter turnout

China, which decided in June 2020 that it owned Hong Kong, is enforcing its own atheistic version of the Ten Commandments. This flies in the face of a city which has long valued economic freedom and which experienced a spiritual revival during the daily mass street protests in 2019 before being silenced by brute communist force. Read More.

Socialist Venezuela targets neighboring 'Free' Guyana

Venezuela’s ruling Marxists are using some time-honored tricks to give their economically battered regime an edge for next year’s presidential elections. In a classic political mobilization tactic, President Nicolas Maduro held a “referendum” to ask his citizens what the future status should be for a mineral rich but disputed region of a neighboring country, namely Guyana. Read More.

Ahead of China-EU summit, Italy pulls plug on Xi's top initiative

Pointing to a major trade imbalance, Italy indicated on Dec. 6 that it would withdraw from communist China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The move came one day ahead of the China-EU summit in Beijing. Read More.

Time to dump Henry Kissinger's dysfunctional China policies?

While the nation has for decades and will continue to mark Henry Kissinger's accomplishments and controversy, it is also time to mark the passing of his dysfunctional and self-defeating policies and approaches toward China under the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Read More.

Donald Kirk: To say Kissinger ‘was a fraud would be too charitable’

On Oct. 26, 1972, then-U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger said “peace is at hand,” insisting he had reached a deal to end the Vietnam War which would have the “North” Vietnamese and their southern affiliate, the Viet Cong remaining in “South” Vietnam and eventually working out an accommodation with the Saigon government, which would still have all the arms it needed from the United States. Read More.

Karl Marx and the roots of antisemitism in China

While Western governments have condemned the Hamas attack, the Xi Jinping regime in Beijing has not. The communist regime has also censored pro-Israel expression, both online and offline. Read More.

Was North Korea's Kim Jong-Un targeted for assassination?

Just because Kim Jong-Un is paranoid doesn’t mean a wide variety of North Korean operatives aren’t out to kill him. Read More.

Feds failed taxpayers in China-linked CA bio lab scandal

In December 2022, an illegal Chinese-owned bio lab in Reedley, California, was discovered when city code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper noted a garden hose protruding from a supposedly unoccupied warehouse. When Ms. Harper first inspected the building, she found numerous building code violations and three employees from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Read More.