T. Belman. Haley recommends that the US decouple from Russia and China economically. She also calls for the US to no longer support Palestinian rejectionism. I feel otherwise. The west should embrace Russia.
She adds ” “Only countries proud of their inheritance can defeat their enemies,”. “Our self loathing has to stop”.”.
She grasps that the west’s back is against the wall — and what it needs to do
US president Joe Biden is about to travel to the Middle East in an attempt to alleviate the mess created by his own ineptitude.
He is due to go cap in hand to Saudi Arabia to beg the leader of a state he has publicly reviled as a human rights “pariah”, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, to bring oil prices down in order to alleviate the fuel shortage caused by the war in Ukraine.
And the reason for that war is the catastrophic signal Biden himself sent out when America scuttled so ignominiously from Afghanistan.
This told Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, that an America that had so badly lost all sense of itself as a defender of freedom wouldn’t lift a finger against Russian aggression.
Thus emboldened, Putin launched his onslaught against Ukraine. Drawing the same conclusion from the rout of America, China has been rubbing its hands over Taiwan which is now at far greater risk of Chinese attack.
And Iran has felt emboldened to thumb its nose at America by ramping up its aggression in the region and brazenly advertising its imminent breakout of nuclear weapons capacity.
In other words, the Biden administration has made the world an infinitely more dangerous place.
So a speech by Nikki Haley in London this week seemed to offer a lifeline.
Haley, who is spoken of as a possible vice-presidential candidate in 2024, was appointed by former US president Donald Trump as America’s ambassador to the United Nations where she did an outstanding job in robustly standing up for Israel and the west against their many enemies.
While she has not declared herself to be running for high office, her delivery of the Colin Cramphorn memorial lecture at the Policy Exchange think-tank sounded like a leadership campaign speech. And with her fellow Republicans seemingly unable to produce a coherent vision for America to counter the disaster of the Biden administration, it was pitch-perfect and received by her conservative London audience like rain in a desert.
It was the speech of a leader rousing not just her party and her nation but also western civilisation itself to battle for survival. For the west, she said, was in danger as a result of its own myopic and craven behaviour.
While Putin’s aggression, she said, was precipitated by the rout of America in Afghanistan, this followed in turn decades of a total failure of deterrence by the west.
Faced with Russia’s aggression in the Crimea and Syria, as well as its use of chemical weapons to target dissidents on the streets of Britain, the west had done almost nothing to hold Putin to account for these crimes.
The west, she warned, was now at an inflection point with its back against the wall. Russia and China had formed an alliance to bring down the west that was closer than the alliance between Mao and Stalin. The third party in this troika of evil was Iran, which was intent upon regional domination and whose own belligerence promoted Russian ambitions.
The west’s lethal mistake, she said, had been to assume that economic interdependence with such regimes would promote peace and avoid conflict. The opposite was the case. Now the west needed to make a fundamental shift by detaching from its enemies and relying instead on its friends.
This, of course, is particularly true in the Middle East. Ever since the fanatical Iranian revolutionary regime came to power in 1979, the west has astoundingly ignored the war that Iran has waged against it through terrorism and the killing of western soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the west has also incentivised endless violence in the Middle East through its insistence on rewarding Palestinian rejectionism and anti-Jewish bigotry by punishing Israel and undermining its security purely for resisting such attempts to destroy it.
What was so refreshing was the clarity of Haley’s message and her refusal to soft-soap brutal realities. If the west is to defend itself, she warned, it has to be prepared to take the pain and sacrifice involved in decoupling from China and Russia. It needs to show strength and the intention to win.
And to do all that, it needs above all to believe that it is actually worth defending. “Only countries proud of their inheritance can defeat their enemies,” she said. “Our self loathing has to stop”.
This indeed is key. Unless the west believes in the principles for which it stands, it cannot survive. America itself is a moral project or it is nothing.
But at the moment, it seems determined to make that second option come true. For it is dangerously riven by the most profound social, cultural and political divisions.
It is divided between intellectual elites and the rest; between black and white; between gender ideologues and those who believe there are men and there are women; between Democrats and Republicans; between pro-Trump Republicans and Never-Trump Republicans.
The divisions are bitter, violent and viciously polarised. Civilised engagement between opposing views seems to have become all but impossible.
Opinions diverging from politically approved positions are being suppressed through character assassination and professional and social intimidation.
The building blocks of society have been grievously undermined. Traditional family life has been eroded. Education has ceased transmitting western culture to the next generation and instead is teaching the young to hate their society.
And as the west has turned on itself, so inevitably it has turned on the Jews through both domestic antisemitism and the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel aimed at bringing about its destruction.
The onslaught being mounted in the western world against the Jewish people will not end unless and until the west ends its own onslaught against itself.
The challenge facing western leaders therefore could not be more momentous. But could any leader meet it? Is it actually possible to stop America’s slide into cultural fragmentation and global impotence?
When asked this question in London, Haley said America simply couldn’t afford to fail. And her own approach showed how, if this desperate task has any chance of succeeding, the west can stop itself from plunging off the edge of the cultural cliff.
The only way is through leadership that exhibits the kind of moral clarity she was expressing. For the reason that evil currently has the upper hand in the world is the absence of leaders prepared to make it clear that they simply won’t stand for attacks on their society at home or on the free world abroad.
What is so astounding isn’t just the appeasement of the west’s enemies abroad. It is also that that, at home, the lunacies of critical race theory and intersectionality have gained such traction in the universities, schools, companies and even the armed forces. It’s all part of the same dismal story — a wholesale absence of western spine.
What makes the timidity of western politicians all the more frustrating is the demonstrable public hunger for such leadership, and the rewards that it brings.
In America, this was demonstrated by last year’s stunning election victory in Virginia of Governor Glenn Youngkin, who gained office in a hitherto solidly Democratic state by emphasising parental rights to make decisions about their children’s education with the slogan, “parents matter”.
And in Israel, the Trump administration’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem not only did not produce the eruption of violence so adamantly predicted by the US State Department and hosts of other faint-hearts, but ushered in the revolutionary Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states.
One thing above all is required at present from the leaders of the west. It’s moral courage. Whoever displays that deserves to win the highest office. It is essential that whoever fails to display it does not.
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Nikki Haley’s legal fight against the NY Attorney General
https://youtu.be/2WodKaiZ_eY
Both Haley and Phillips have demonstrated strong support for Israel along with other admirable qualities. Yet they share in some oddly similar way a certain patrician sensibility which makes them incapable of supporting rough-cut figures like Trump or Robinson. Phillips’ disdainful repudiation of Tommy Robinson as a contemptible ruffian was shameful beyond words. Haley was respectful of Trump to his face throughout her tenure, but, when it appeared to her after Jan 6th that he was out of the picture, she was waiting in line to help kick him out the door.
If these two capable women want to be more effective in helping defend the West from its enemies, they need to be learn to be willing to accept allies who are not well-spoken and genteel but who fight for all they are worth for truth, decency and justice.
Which West is Melanie referring to?
The WEF?
The conservative movement slowly taking off in Europe and the US?
The socialists?
I wonder!
@Sebastien
Well described!
I was writing something far less succinct than this to the same effect.
@Raphael I loved Sarah Palin. There was a great Israpundit like Zionist blog, Jews for Sarah. Remember it?
https://politico.com/interactives/2021/magazine-nikki-haleys-choice/
No never Trumper has a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the Republican candidate for President even if Trump bows out. She is feted only by Dems and Rinos like GW Bush and Liz Cheney., McCarthy and Kinsinger.
Haley was a staunch friend of Israel as ambassador to the UN, and she had a good reputation as governor, as far as I know, but I don’t think she has the good judgement to be president. I feel the same way about Shaked, great justice and interior minister, not PM material.
As a never Trumper, even when she worked for him, and after when she condemned him for the Zelensky phone call, even if she didn’t suppoert impeachment at that time. but especially now that she’s joined the Jan 6 witch hunters, she has about as much future as Liz Chaney.
And her opposition to the most pro-Israel president, Johnson was, too, but not so effective, is not pro-Israel.
I really like Nikki Haley. She was a terror to America’s enemies in the UN. Sarah Palin was a step in the right direction, but she didn’t quite cut it. I had hoped that Haley would be “the one” to establish Conservative women at the top level of government, (VP or someday possibly President). This may yet come to pass, but I have a few reservations.
First of all, there is the “business” of being a politician, aka “fundraising”. From the moment that Haley left the government, all I have ever received from her organization have been click-bait emails with solicitations for money. I get it, anyone with political aspirations needs money, but the way she (or her organization) has gone about it, really rubs me the wrong way, and it sends a very unattractive message.
Now, she has taken up the demonization of Putin and Russia, for their “aggression” against Ukraine, stating that Putin felt emboldened by our loss of deterrence and by the Afghanistan debacle. To assert that these are the reasons for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine either betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying Ukrainian situation, or a lack of intellectual honesty. Haley sees Russia as an adversary to be opposed. Her former boss, Donald Trump, on the other hand, saw Russia as an entity with its own interests, and Vladimir Putin as a tough, though reasonable man, with whom he could “work”. This, by the way, underscores the advantage of having a true business man running the country rather than a politician. It’s a fundamentally different way of looking at the world.
Haley does seem to be a staunch supporter of Israel, and for that, I applaud her, as I do for her strong stance against state sponsors of terrorism (Iran). Haley is also correct in her positions on the ongoing culture wars. I agree with her that we should de-couple from China. The sooner the better.
There is much to like about Nikki Haley, but a couple things temper my support for her.
@vivarto. Actually, it was the spearatist regimes in the Donbas, supported by Russia, that violated the Minsk Protocol and declared it a dead letter. This from Wikipedia”:
I agree 100% with Melanie and Haley.
Ms. Phillips went hard over to distance herself from Tommy Robinson, who was jailed and suffered terribly merely for publicly expressing the opinion that the English government had given up too much to Islamist interests,… for the fact that Mr. Robinson had previously been part of groups that she had vociferously opposed. The odd way allies are made from former enemies was not an option to Ms. Phillips.
Nikki Haley has done a lot to discredit herself with Trump supporters and independents by her swift turning against Trump just after January 6–could not see the pure put-up job that it was. Making an ally of her now would depend on her steadfastness for right policy. Alienating Russia more, while we are being spiritually and economically softened for China’s next big move, does not seem like a wise move. More at opportunistic, and Ms. Haley’s speeches often leave the listener flat. Ms. Phillips is one of the sharpest analysts out there, and an exceptional writer, but she has a blind spot–as we all do–at finding allies for just causes. As Ms. Haley was such an ardent supporter of Israel, it must have seemed that she was a sound thinker across the board. Much in doubt.
Sadly, Melany who used to be quite sharp has fallen victim of the globalist propaganda machine when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
There was no Russian aggression in Crimea. Crimea is just as Russian as Cornwall is English.
And and calling the poisoning of former-KGB officers, “use of chemical weapons”, is demagoguery.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is a defensive action after 8 years of Russia trying to persuade the West to support the Minsk agreements which were unanimously supported by the security council.