Is China the New Middle East Power Broker? – AJC Advocacy Anywhere

April 4, 2023 | 4 Comments »

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  2. Hi, Ted.

    Kim made a point of comparing a rules based order with a totalitarian order suggesting that the latter is finding more and more respect in the world today. and suggested that democracy is fine for rich countries but most other countries are better off with an authoritarian government.

    I hope you don’t agree with her. The inestimably valuable part of the the democratic traditions you and I live under, is that regular, established, free and fair elections provide a bloodless transition of power from one leader to the next. In the US, we’ve had an unbroken string of presidents of the union for 233 years, some eight generations; and for some five generations beyond that, my forefathers were able to freely choose their own governors. That’s thirteen generations of free men, able to freely choose for themselves the destinies of their lives and their country. Ms. Kiu does not have this background, and neither do the vast majority of people on this planet; so I don’t expect her or them to understand what it means to be a free person in her own country, with Torah as its foundation.

  3. Kim made a point of comparing a rules based order with a totalitarian order suggesting that the latter is finding more and more respect in the world today. and suggested that democracy is fine for rich countries but most other countries are better off with an authoritarian government.

    In many ways, the elites in America would agree with her. They want to do away with democracy as witnessed by their election fraud and rejection of the will of the people.

    I met Carice Witte 10 years ago, After getting a degree from Yale in Chinese, East Asian studies , she made aliya and founded SIGNAL, Sino-Israel Global Network & Academic. Leadership.
    I admired her for having focused on China with real determination.

  4. I listened to most of the first half of the video, which covered everything I was interested in.

    Kuo did a very good job of summarizing China’s long-term interests in the Middle East (and the world). She noted that

    1. the current world order is a “Rules Based” order, centered on the US, and that

    2. China, Russia and Iran intend to become centers of hegemonic “Athoritarian” alternative partial-world orders.

    First of all, note that I have correctly called these “partial-world” orders. That underlines the fact that if China et al succeed in breaking down the current “Unipolar” (as Putin calls it) world order, another “unipolar” order will inevitably replace it. Neither China nor Russia have historically been well placed by their geography to do so. China, for its part, is easily hemmed in by encircling mountains, desert and island chains, and Russia is nearly land-locked at the frozen northern edge of civilization.

    Middle Eastern countries have historically ruled regional empires. These have straddled major sea lanes, and COULD have developed the blue-water navies necessary to exploit these conduits, as China appears to be trying to do; but only the Atlantic powers like Western Europe and America have had the NECESSITY to do so.

    If the totalitarian states succeed in destroying the current order, therefore, what we can foresee, at best, is a continual conflict between a land-based Eastern empire based on China, and a sea-based Western empire based on the Atlantic. Israel, of course, is located in what would become the main conflict zone.

    The second point Kuo made, by implication, is the elephant in the room: that the current world order is a RULES BASED order, based, at least to some degree, on agreement between participants; but the alternative, AUTHORITARIAN orders are centered, essentially, on single individuals (Xi, Putin, the Ayatollah).

    This ought to set off an alarm to those in countries contemplating replacing the old with the new. People have become inured, over the past few centuries, with an order ruled by some semblence of justice, and of the harmonious settling of grievances. What we would be opening the door to would not just be exchanging, say, Chinese rules for Common Law rules, but the personal pleasure of autocrats for something with a semblance of peace.

    I posit that what the rulers of today, like the Ayatollah, the King and the Israelis, are contemplating, is not discarding an old, “outdated” system with an “alternative”, but simply the COLLAPSE of civilization as we know it. The “unipolar, rules-based” world order will not go away; it will have a “Regime” change.