Speaking to approximately 200 participants in a Jewish Policy Center video webinar on September 24, Blumenthal said China “has gone from zero feet tall to six feet tall … in an incredibly short time.” This explosive growth—enabled by a U.S.-led Western push to include China in international trade—has given Beijing an economic base the Soviets never possessed to support sweeping international ambitions.

Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, is author of China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State, to be published in November. But China’s rapid economic growth and military expansion and modernization mask “huge internal problems.” These leave China “stuck at six feet tall” and cause Xi and the CCP to distract the Chinese by “lashing out” on the international scene, he said.

America’s recognition of danger from Beijing has been accelerated by China’s mishandling of the new coronavirus pandemic early this year, Blumenthal noted, Nevertheless, the countless ties between the U.S. and Chinese economies, the world’s two largest, “are more entwined … and much more difficult to decouple” than Washington-Moscow links ever were during the Cold War, he said.

Though influential business interests may be loath to change the relationship much, “the national security argument is gaining the upper hand,” and returning some strategically important production and supply chains, including medical as well as military, is occurring, according to Blumenthal.

China seeks to overcome the U.S. defense/military strategy in East Asia since the end of World War II, Blumenthal asserted. That strategy relied “on a system of alliances and direct U.S. military power” in the region.

CCP leadership has worked “steadily since the 1990s to neutralize U.S. power,” Blumenthal said. Xi’s aggressive policies and “formidable” military cause the Pentagon to worry “we could lose a war with China” if one erupted, most likely through miscalculation by Beijing that Washington would not respond to counter some significant provocation.

China’s inflexible intention to reclaim Taiwan as a lost province poses the greatest risk of miscalculation and open hostilities with the United States, Blumenthal commented. Ultimately, the CCP wants “to subjugate Japan.” Washington needs to make clear to Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and other regional countries China seeks to cow that regardless of its own domestic divisions, it will support them.

In response to Chinese intimidation, the United States seeks to modernize its military while repositioning some forces to East Asia. These necessary reactions, however, mean that “China already is winning in terms of the psychological competition” with America to influence allies like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, Blumenthal noted.

U.S.-China strategic rivalry occurs not only in terms of direct military capabilities but also in areas of telecommunications, date privacy, cyber security and others.

“But in other ways China is getting weaker,” Blumenthal said. He noted the unreliability of official government statistics and estimated Covid-19 infection rates may have been understated by a factor or 30 to 40 times. “Reporting on bad news is not done in China.”

However, Blumenthal estimated that the Chinese economy has recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic enough so that its annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate is probably around three to four percent. Most Western countries would love to have s

Israel’s “Abraham Accord” peace agreement with the United Arab Emirates, signed on August 13, is “a game-changer” the Jewish state was “waiting [on] for so long.” It alters relations among Middle Eastern countries and movements in several positive ways, according to Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, Israel Defense Forces (Ret.).

Speaking on the Jewish Policy Center video webinar on September 10, Kuperwasser, a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said “for the first time” peace between Israel and an Arab state has been reached “not based on ending a war … and returning land” but rather on mutual advantage. And instead of angry criticism from other Middle Eastern players when Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, or grudging tolerance when Jordan did likewise in 1994, “this time everyone likes it.”

Not everyone, of course, Kuperwasser noted. Palestinian leadership continues to assail the UAE for “treason” and Iran’s leaders threaten retaliation against the emirates in response to potential Israeli attacks, but they currently sound like minority voices.

“Egypt was boycotted in the Arab world” when it recognized Israel and signed a peace treaty, the former director-general of Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs recalled. This even though Israel yielded the Sinai Peninsula—captured from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War and held in the 1973 Yom Kippur War—with its Israeli-developed oil fields, air bases and the new town of Yamit and outlying villages.

But in reaction to the Israeli-UAE agreement, “the Palestinians can’t convince the Arab League to meet to take action against it.” Instead, Palestinian Arab leadership is hearing from politicians and scholars in what Kuperwasser calls “the Sunni pragmatics”—including Persian Gulf states like the emirates, Bahrain, Oman and even Saudi Arabia—that the time has come to drop their 100-year struggle against the Jews and their state as an intrinsic part of the Middle East.

For the UAE, “the agreement with Israel was the right thing to do … it was not imposed on them.” And Sunni pragmatists believe “Palestinians should do the same,” finally recognizing there is not going to be any “return” of the descendants of Arab refugees from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. They must understand that a “two-state solution” will comprise one Jewish state and one Palestinian Arab state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, not two Arab countries west of the Jordan River, one with a Jewish minority.

Still, “when Palestinians hear this … they go crazy,” Kuperwasser said. Meanwhile, many others in the Arab Gulf countries are “talking about cooperation” and new achievements in reciprocal relations, unlike after Israel’s treaties with Egypt and Jordan, he noted.

This means Palestinian Arab “veto power” over general Arab-Israeli relations has been broken, he added. Palestinian leaders no longer can dictate to other Arabs the nature of their relations with Israel, especially not after U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital and proposal of a two-state deal that explicitly recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.

And the possibility that Jerusalem eventually will extend Israeli sovereignty to significant parts of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) is more likely to be determined in Washington, D.C. than Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah, Kuperwasser said. It has been the United States, not the UAE, that recently pressured Israel to delay extending sovereignty, he asserted.

Kuperwasser noted that Sudan’s interim government—limited legally in what it can do—seemed to be moving toward recognizing Israel and Bahrain also might follow the UAE. After Saudi Arabia first allowed a direct flight from Ben-Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv over its airspace to the UAE, and then on September 9 said it routinely would permit Israeli overflights “other countries un



Doran began his presentation saying that Chinese influence over Middle Eastern countries is widespread but goes widely unnoticed in Western capitals. The Chinese military, commercial, and political presence have affected the actions of both U.S. allies and foes on issues such as trade routes, strategic waterways, Iran sanction, and Russian intervention in Syria.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative helps Central Asian nations develop infrastructure to increase trade with China. Such investments make local communities more dependent on China for growth, but it also increases Beijing’s political influence. These projects will help increase the stability of supply routes for raw materials to China, which are essential to not only keep domestic support for the communist party, i.e. keep the economy growing. 

Doran’s presentation echoed his article in Tablet Magazine, “China’s Emerging Middle Eastern Kingdom.” “The jewel in the crown of the Belt and Road Initiative is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor—a multibillion-dollar program to build highways, rail lines, and pipelines from the port of Gwadar [Pakistan] on the Indian Ocean to Xinjiang… While Beijing is now presenting Gwadar as an entirely commercial venture, upon completion it will certainly become a military base, which will assist Beijing in flanking India. CPEC will also shorten and harden China’s supply lines. Gwadar will serve as a transshipment hub for oil and natural gas and other raw materials that will flow overland through pipelines to Xinjiang, then on to points farther east in China.”

The total distance from “China to the Persian Gulf is over 5,000 nautical miles, through waters that, in time of war, will likely be impassable. By contrast, the distance from the Persian Gulf to Gwadar is less than 600 nautical miles.”

But Xinjiang is also part of the Uighur heartland. “The northern terminus of the corridor is Kashgar—a Uighur city which, with cameras in every crevice, is likely the most surveilled metropolitan area in the world. China is crushing the Uighurs, in other words, because their territory sits athwart China’s critical overland supply routes.”

Historically, the Chinese ethnic Han population has been large enough that they don’t feel threatened by the minorities. Some of these minorities are also very large by international standards and their persistence shows that genocide is not the norm in Chinese history. So why are they doing it to the Uighurs? Well, the answer is that the group is on the path between China and the Middle East. “How determined is China in its advance toward the Middle East? Determined enough to commit genocide.”

Beijing put its first overseas base eight miles away from the only American military base in Africa. The Chinese naval facility in Djibouti guards the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint in line with the Red Sea and Suez Canal, ultimately connecting the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. It is a transit route for oil to Europe. 

Connecting the choke points near bases in Djibouti and Gwadar gives China a “thumb on the world’s windpipe. Which appears to be exactly the vision that shapes the ambitions of Chinese war planners.”

The Chinese behavior is increasingly aggressive. They use the facility to surveil the U.S. military and try t

In Syria, Lebanon and now Iran, things are blowing up. In recent weeks Iranian nuclear sites and ports, transshipment facilities used by Iran in Syria and precision guided munitions installations of Tehran’s proxies in Lebanon have been hit by mysterious explosions and fires.

A campaign undertaken three to five years ago by Israel in Lebanon now apparently reaches into Iran itself, not that Israeli officials publicly take credit. To understand why, one must go back to 2011-2012 and the start of Syria’s civil wars, says Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

In addition to bolstering Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, “Iran tried to exploit [chaos in Syria] all it could to deploy hard assets” including armed forces and missiles close to the border with Israel. Schanzer reminded 160 participants on a July 22 Jewish Policy Center webcast that the goal of Tehran’s ruling mullahs was “to turn Tel Aviv in Seoul.” That is, to put Israel’s largest metropolitan area under a massive, imminent military threat like that facing the South Korean capital from North Korea’s military, just 25 miles north across the Demilitarized Zone.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah (the Shi’ite Party of God), Iran’s main terrorist surrogate in the Middle East and elsewhere, possesses up to an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles—in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which helped end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. In the Gaza Strip, the Iranian-supported Hamas (Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement) collected and built another 10,000 to 15,000.

Israel’s Iron Dome and other missile defense systems could block most enemy projectiles likely to hit their targets. “But if they all were launched in a short time,” Schanzer said, “there’s no way Israel could survive without massive damage.”

Especially not if the rockets and missiles were retro-fitted or built new not as “dumb bombs” but instead as precision-guided munitions (PGMs), able to change course as commanded while in flight. “So, the Iranians decided in recent years they needed to up their game,” he noted. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has been spearheading an effort to turn dumb rockets into precision weapons,” said Schanzer, a former senior director of the Jewish Policy Center and author of, among other works, State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the Unmaking of Palestine.

An Iron Dome battery of 15 missiles might be able to counter an equal number of enemy rockets, Schanzer said. But if 16 were launched at one target and the one that penetrated was a PGM with the ability to strike within five to 10 yards of its bulls’-eye—say Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona, Defense Ministry’s haKirya headquarters in Tel Aviv or chemical plants in Haifa—the resultant mass casualties could start a general Middle East war.

“Syria has been the way station for all of this,” including Iranian attempts to build PGM sites in Lebanon. Some explosions and fires become less mysterious when it’s remembered that Israeli officials have called such guided weapons “game-changing,” he added.

Iranian or Iranian-supplied PGM’s threaten not only Israel but also Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, Schanzer said. He pointed to attacks by Tehran-supported Houthi rebels in Yemen on Saudi oil facilities and by pro-Iranian Iraqi militia against U.S. forces in the region.

Proliferation of such weaponry “could be extremely dangerous for the entire region,” Schanzer noted. But in any case, “the Israelis are always the tip of the spear.” Hence the Israeli-Iranian “war in the shadows” or “war between the wars” of the past three or four years. By intensifying pre-emptive attacks, “Israel wants to try to forestall” an all-out war.

Hezbollah’s entrenchment in Leban



This year the U.S. Supreme Court “really became [Chief Justice John] Roberts’ court,”  Ilya Shapiro believes. Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush, “was in the majority more than anyone.”

Contrary to criticism from some conservatives, Roberts’ functioned overall as the court’s anchor, not weathervane, Shapiro told about 200 participants in a July 15 webinar hosted by the Jewish Policy Center.  The result in the 2019-2020 terms was “by no means liberal.” In fact, he and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by President Donald Trump, were the two members most likely to agree, Shapiro said.

Director of the CATO Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, Shapiro noted that, due in part to Covid-19 pandemic closures, the high court issued a “record low” number of signed opinions in its 2019-2020 term, 53. Roberts “was in the majority 97 percent of the time.”

But unlike predecessors Anthony Kennedy and William Brennan who most frequently were in Supreme Court majorities, the chief justice “isn’t a true swing vote.” Instead, it is more useful to think of him “as an anchor” among justices, said Shapiro, a JPC advisory board member.

In a decision decried by some conservatives, Bostock v. Clayton County (Georgia), it was Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, not Roberts who drew criticism from the right, who wrote the majority opinion. The court’s 6-3 ruling in Bostock said “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights  Act banned employment discrimination on the grounds of biological sexual identity.

But Gorsuch also wrote a “most protective interpretation of religious liberty” in cases regarding the “ministerial exception” from federal employment and health care mandates on religious conscience grounds. This would protect many employees, not just clergy members, in houses of worship, religious schools and affiliated agencies, and nuns in the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Sisters have long fought Obamacare requirements through the Department of Health and Human Services to pay for birth control and abortion coverage as part of their medical insurance, Shapiro pointed out.

In an abortion rights case, Roberts and the court’s four members nominated by Democratic presidents struck down a Louisiana law that required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Four years earlier, Roberts was in the minority in a similar case from Texas.

This year, in ruling to uphold the precedent of the Texas case from which he had dissented, Roberts supported the legal principle of stare decisis, Shapiro said. This asserts that decisions should follow previous rulings in cases with similar facts. “We’ll see what happens in the next such case,” Shapiro added, suggesting the Louisiana ruling did not mean the Supreme Court would not restrict abortion on demand in future rulings.

Roberts, joined by the court’s four Democratic nominees, wrote the majority opinion in a 5-4 decision rejecting the Trump administration’s termination of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals. DACA is an Obama administration procedure allowing migrants who came to the United States illegally as children to remain. That opinion did not determine DACA’s legality but rather said the administration failed to justify properly its decision to end the program.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas called the majority opinion “an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.” He said that gave “the green light for future political battles to be fought in this Court rather than where they rightfully belong—the political branches.”

But according to Shapiro, Roberts’ DACA majority opini

Israel’s relations with Arab countries of the Persian Gulf continue to develop, quietly. And that’s how it should be, says Gulf expert Simon Henderson.

How Israel’s possible extension of sovereignty to some Jewish settlements on the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Jordan River Valley might affect such ties is not clear, Henderson told approximately 200 people on a Jewish Policy Center teleconference call July 8.     That’s because while the rulers may focus on national interests, the Palestinian cause remains popular with their publics.

Such support results from “decades of education and information depicting Israel as evil.” But decision-making in the six Gulf Cooperation Council members—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman—is top-down. Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy, Henderson said “leadership of these countries … often just the top man” sets policy. They “don’t talk to the people about what they don’t think is the people’s business to know.”

When the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved its embassy there from Tel Aviv, the belief the Arab world would explode proved mistaken. If Israel does extend sovereignty to parts of the West Bank and a big, negative reaction results, Henderson said he would look at Jordan, the “East Bank” state with a majority Palestinian Arab population.

He also pointed out that Yousef al-Otaiba, UAE’s ambassador to the United States, in an unprecedented column in Israel’s largest Hebrew-language newspaper, acknowledged growing Arab-Israeli relations but warned Jerusalem it could have “annexation or normalization.” Yet not long after, companies from the UAE and Israel signed agreements to cooperate on coronavirus research. “If you want consistency … and an end to ambiguity” the Gulf is the wrong place to find it, Henderson said.

GCC states may not have much leverage on Palestinian leaders, he added. The latter used to rely on the oil and natural gas-rich states for funding, “but that is no longer the case.”

Trade Greases Wheels

Qatar, which with Israeli approval continues to provide money, including for coronavirus relief efforts in the Gaza Strip, tightly controls the aid. It is supposed to go to individual families, not the Strip’s Hamas rulers.

GCC-Israel “diplomatic recognition will be elusive for a while,” Henderson said. But even without it up to now, “Israel’s relations with Gulf states have developed very well” and been “very rewarding to both sides.” Remaining less than formal may allow them to continue to grow.

Ties between Israel and most members of the council existed five years ago, and “are even further down the road” today. Shared fears of Iranian subversion and aggression are not the only reason for active if low-profile ties.

Trade is another. Despite the Arab League’s economic boycott of Israel, established even before the country won its independence in 1948, the Arab Gulf states eventually charted a different approach, said Henderson, who started covering the Middle East in the 1970s as a journalist with the BBC and Financial Times.

After GCC countries—hereditary Sunni Muslim sheikdoms reliant on petroleum extraction—established strong economies in the 1970s, they “have been interested in trade with Israel,” he noted. In Jerusalem in 1995 for the funeral of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the mourners was a senior official from Qatar, “in traditional Arab dress,” Henderson said.

The steady growth of commercial relations is “an untold story … probably best to remain untold … not to put anyone at risk,” he added. The nature of Israel-GCC countries ties should be painted in shifting shades of gray, rather than simplistically in black-and-white, Henderson stressed.

The status of Israeli-Emirati diplomatic relat

“We keep hearing the word ‘annexation’” regarding Israel’s plans for several major settlement areas and parts of the Jordan River Valley, noted Arsen Ostrovsky, an expert on international law, on a Jewish Policy Center conference call June 25. But that’s the wrong term, he stated. What the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Benny Gantz intend is “application of Israeli sovereignty.”

The difference is crucial legally and politically, Ostrovsky said. When it comes to “annexation” versus “sovereignty” Israel and its supporters “are fighting a war of narratives. … Words matter” because they shape people’s perceptions, positively or negatively, he added.

Palestinian factions, some but not all Arab states and some but again not all member countries of the European Union have warned Israel of dangerous consequences should it declare a formal replacement of ostensibly temporary military administration with sovereign government. At issue as part of the Trump administration’s “Vision for Peace” are large Jewish communities including Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim and up to 30 percent of the Jordan Valley in the disputed West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

A human rights lawyer, Ostrovsky noted that Israel gained the territories in self-defense the 1967 Six-Day War. Jordan illegally had occupied them as a result of aggression during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Previously part of the League of Nations/U.N. Palestine Mandate, under which international law recognized the Jewish people’s right to reestablish its national homeland, Israel hardly can annex “what’s legally yours,” he said.

“We keep hearing about U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234,” adopted in December 2016, Ostrovsky pointed out. The measure falsely condemned Jewish communities in the territories—including post-’67 Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem—as illegal under international law. Hostile to Netanyahu, the Obama administration withheld a U.S. veto.

But the fact that the land at issue “was not taken from another state … is critical under international law,” he said. Territories illegally annexed from one country to another include Russia’s grab of Crimea from Ukraine and Turkey’s Cyprus invasion that created the “Turkish Republic of North Cyprus.” Israel’s presence in the West Bank is contrary to Russia’s in Crimea and Turkey’s on Cyprus, so Resolution 2234 “negates the Jewish people’s very connection to Judea and Samaria,” connections rooted in both history and law.

Further, applying Israeli sovereignty to the 500,000 or 600,000 Jewish residents of the territory would make their lives easier by ending overlapping remnants of Ottoman law, Mandatory regulations and Israeli law. But it would not impose a major change on the region’s Palestinian Arabs, according to Ostrovsky. (The Palestinian Authority claims 2.9 million Arabs live on the West Bank; some Israeli demographers charge that figure double-counts several hundred thousand and ignores emigration of many others.)

Contrary to critics, sovereignty would not create Israeli “apartheid” over Arab communities but “maintain more or less the status quo,” Ostrovsky said. In the long term, should Palestinian leaders finally choose to negotiate an end to the conflict, “these areas could become part of a Palestinian state” with 70 percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he said. That’s one reason some Jewish settlers are “not jumping up and down for joy” at talk of extending sovereignty.

The Israeli public, considering Palestinian rejection of two-state offers—Israel and a West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestine with eastern Jerusalem as its capital—in 2000, 2001 and 2008 “has moved on. … We don’t have a real peace partner.” That being so, it’s time to regularize the status of many if not most of the Jews living in the territories—and perhaps, by doing so, prod

Hong Kong’s “finest hour” may also be it’s last as an autonomous entity under the flag of China. Veteran journalist Claudia Rosett, who’s covered both the communist mainland and virtual city-state of capitalist Hong Kong—and lived in the latter —is pessimistic.

But hundreds of thousands and sometimes more than one million of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents have protested repeatedly since Beijing accelerated its erasure of their “one country, two systems” arrangement last year. This means “they will not go gently into the night” of President Xi Jinping’s brutal dictatorship, Rosett told hundreds of participants on a Jewish Policy Center conference call June 11. And Hong Kong might thereby inspire mainland Chinese.

“People all want freedom, Rosett said, “but when deprived of it … they behave in strange ways,” including adopting what George Orwell called “doublethink” to square the reality they live with the government-imposed lies they are forced to believe. “China’s government is channeling all the hostility” felt against it “toward the United States and the West,” she asserted. “That where it gets dangerous.”

Rosett, a foreign policy fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, has covered Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, including for 18 years for The Wall Street Journal. She exposed the U.N.’s corrupt “oil-for-food” program with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea’s labor camps in Russia’s Far East.

Last month China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress endorsed Xi’s move to extend Beijing’s censorship to Hong Kong. This means the international financial hub “is in the process of being obliterated as a free society,” Rosset said.

Nevertheless, “what’s happening there is quite remarkable,” she said of the mass pro-democracy movement that has taken to the streets repeatedly. And, underscored by the recent arrest of 15 movement leaders, “quite frankly, heart-breaking.”

The 1997 treaty by which Great Britain handed its colony of Hong Kong back to China claimed to guarantee the city far-reaching autonomy for 50 years. But like many treaties deposited with the United Nations, it included no meaningful enforcement mechanism, Rosett noted.

Rosset covered the 1989 anti-regime demonstrations in China’s capital. She was then editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal’s Asia edition. She reminded JPC call participants that a “democratic uprising took over Beijing for several weeks,” threatening the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy. “Until this year, Hong Kong was the only place [under the Chinese flag] allowed to commemorate” the June 4 massacre of hundreds and more likely thousands of demonstrators in the capital’s Tiananmen Square.

This year, acting through a Hong Kong city government dominated by Beijing loyalists, Xi’s regime used coronavirus pandemic restrictions to bar the June 4 anniversary commemoration. Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers turned out despite the ban, Rosett said.

Xi became president in 2013, arranged the elimination of term limits to achieve “president for life” status, and then embarked on a drive to make China the leading world power. “It sounds like a bad movie but … he really does want to rule the world.”

Even before Xi’s elevation Hong Kong residents had staged massive protests against successive Beijing maneuvers to curtail the “one country, two systems” agreement, Rosett said.

In 2014, demonstrators opposed to a National People’s Congress plan for tighter screening of candidates for Hong Kong elections occupied the city’s central business district for more than two months. This “umbrella movement” elicited worldwide support, including some in mainland China. So, Rosset noted, Xi swore in a loyalist, Carrie Lam, as the city’s chief executive in 2017.

Lam’s attempt to pass legislation permitting ext

The bilateral U.S.-Israel relationship carries a new burden. Extra weight has come in recent years in the form of the trilateral U.S.-China-Israel connection, according to Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy.

The United States faces an “unprecedented challenge” from China, a country that is simultaneously a major international economic player and a major aggressive threat, Feith said.

China’s more aggressive, militaristic posture has prompted concern in Washington about how Jerusalem relates to Beijing, Feith told a Jewish Policy Center conference call on June 3. But U.S. policy makers also fret over their own decisions regarding the world’s second-largest economy and, by personnel, its largest—and rapidly modernizing—armed forces.

“The U.S.-Israel-China relationship became pressing only recently,” Feith said. More nakedly aggressive Chinese policies under Xi Jinping, who took over as president in 2013, are the reason why.

After spending several years consolidating power over the Chinese Communist Party, government, economy and military, Xi resolved something of a debate among Chinese leaders, Feith told approximately 200 call participants. Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Communist China’s founding leader, Mao Zedong, pursued a “hide and bide, and don’t lead” strategy while the People’s Republic opened itself to Western trade without loosening the party’s grip on power. If Beijing became too assertive too early, Deng feared, “the great powers, particularly the United States,” would try to stifle it.

Feith, who served in President George W. Bush’s administration from 2001 to 2005, said U.S. officials noted “two schools of thought” among Chinese party and military officials on “what is the path to China’s national greatness?” Countering Deng’s more patient approach “was another school … more aggressive, more militaristic” that argued “the time has come for China to emerge from hide-and-bide … and take the lead in the region, demand deference” and be able to rival the United States.

Xi “has resolved that question” in favor of the expansionists, Feith said. His China insists on recognition as a world power, one offering a competing model of prosperous authoritarianism to Western democratic capitalism as embodied by the United States.

Beijing’s propaganda claims that America spent the last century trying “to keep China down” are false, Feith asserted. President Richard Nixon’s landmark trip to China and summit meeting with Mao was a Cold War stratagem to use the People’s Republic to offset the Soviet Union. But with Deng’s economic liberalization, U.S. policy makers wanted “to strengthen the hand of those [in China] who argued for integration” into international trade and diplomacy.

For several decades the United States and other Western democracies “helped China grow economically,” said Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Americans “transferred technology to China and … assisted it to join the World Trade Organization,” among other initiatives.

Policy makers and academics believed “the effect would be to increase China’s appreciation of integration into the world of more advanced economies.” China would become more prosperous; a middle class would emerge and pressure the country’s Communist Party for political and civil rights. Rather than try to suppress China’s development, Washington assisted it, even defending the country against accusations it wasn’t living up to its WTO and other international obligations, according to Feith.

This “convergence theory” proved illusory. Under Xi, China intimidates its neighbors, claims ownership of the South China Sea, ostentatiously deploys its military, challenges the United States and tries to push it out of Asia and beyond, Feith said.

Although President Donald Trump has been inconsistent at times on China, his administration incudes “a numbe

In photographs with leaders of other NATO countries, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks like his male peers, beardless and wearing a western suit and tie. But given his performance since 2003, first as prime minister, more recently as president, Erdogan’s looks should no longer be deceiving.

Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islamic culture and the Middle East in the secretary of defense’s office from 1982 through 2010, said Erdogan clearly is “an Islamic fundamentalist.” Yet even now, “most of us in the West don’t understand his mentality,” Rhode told participants in a Jewish Policy Center conference call on May 20.

“In the West, religion is between man and God,” Rhode pointed out. “But Islam is not just a religion but also a civilization with extremely important political elements,” he stressed.

Rhode, who earned a doctorate in Islamic history at Columbia University and has traveled extensively in the Middle East, said it’s important to understand that for an Islamist like Erdogan, “there is no separation of mosque and state.” Further, “all Muslims are brothers”—even if they frequently resort to violence in settling intra-Islamic conflicts.

That means political systems and national borders are less important than relationships from the family to the ummah, the transnational community of Islamic believers. And since no other religion or civilization is superior to Islam, in what might be considered a much earlier version of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s doctrine of irreversible communist imperialism, any territory once ruled by Muslims—including present-day Spain as well as modern Israel—must never again be governed by non-Muslims.

In the belief of Islamists like the Turkish president, the only border that really counts separates dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, from dar al-harb, the world of war. And the latter “will eventually become Muslim,” Rhode said.

So Erdogan, Rhode emphasized, is undoing the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular, Western-oriented Turkish Republic in the 1920s. Ataturk attempted to impose a national identity of “we are all Turks” on anyone living inside Turkey borders, including non-Turkish Kurds and non-Sunni Muslim Alevis. But Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party stress what others have called a border-crossing neo-Ottoman identity.

Rhode, now a distinguished senior fellow for the Gatestone Institute and senior fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said that in Northern Macedonia he found pictures of Erdogan and Turkish flags in local mosques. Their clergy, dispatched from Turkey, preach a more fundamentalist Islam than previously common in the Balkans, and worshippers refer to Erdogan as “our leader.” Turkey’s economy may be suffering, but subsidies from Qatar enable the Turkish leader to pursue his dreams, Rhode said.

Also, in recent speeches, Erdogan has asserted that victories for him or Turkey are just as important in Damascus, Sarajevo or Jerusalem as in Istanbul or Ankara. “He is not interested so much in Turkey as in reestablishing the Ottoman Empire,” Rhode said.

As in the Balkans, Turkey attempts to infiltrate Erdogan’s form of Islam into eastern Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, Rhode added. The Turkish leader’s long-term policy toward Israel is “anything to get the Jews out. … I see in the Old City of Jerusalem a lot of institutions run by the Turks.”

Erdogan “is actively doing the same in Germany” as in North Macedonia and eastern Jerusalem, Rhode said. Turkey’s Islamism is promoted among Germany’s millions of residents of Turkish background and via the million-plus refugees funneled from war-torn Syria through Turkey into European Union countries.

Westerners were taken in by Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party not only on the basis of appearances. They were finessed by rhetoric a