Welcome to reality! After a week of fanfare, during which the leaders of Swiss and international business, politics and the media patted themselves on the back and praised their merits and successes in “improving the state of the world”, the Davos Forum has closed its doors again. It will be rough to come down to earth.

  At the beginning of October, I tried to show that the West must not only come to terms with the defeat of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, but must also face up to the moral defeat to which its persistent policy of double standards – preaching water and drinking wine – has led it.
  In the meantime, the events in Gaza have turned this moral defeat into a strategic defeat.
  The drama of us Westerners – to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln – is that we can lie to ourselves all the time and fool the rest of the world some of the time, but we can no longer fool all the people all the time. Now the time comes when we have to pay the bill. Emmanuel Todd reaches this unequivocal conclusion in a different way in his latest book (“La défaite de l’Occident”, Gallimard, 2024). With his usual brilliance, he draws on statistical data, economic and cultural developments and a rigour of argument that is difficult to dispute. We will come back to this.
  If the fog of war, the effectiveness of censorship, and the intensity of propaganda in Ukraine could give the impression that the entire responsibility for this conflict lies with “Putin-the-demon”, the invasion of Gaza and the subsequent war crimes of the Israeli army will have opened the eyes of those among us who are blindest. The world was rightly shocked by the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October, but now – with the exception of the West – it is stunned by the pathological rage and meticulousness displayed by the Israeli invaders over the past three months. The justified outrage at Hamas’ crimes is now being followed by no less justified outrage at the Israel Defense Forces’ attacks on the Palestinian civilian population.
  Even the law of retaliation – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – was not observed by the Jewish state, as it officially calls itself, although Judaism does refer to it: At 20 to 1 (23,000 Palestinians killed, 1,100 Israeli victims), all the limits of the code were exceeded. Many thousands of Jews in Israel and around the world are alarmed by this.
  The Israeli state appears to the majority of the world for what it is – an oppressive, annexationist, neocolonial state that openly practises apartheid and ethnic cleansing, as Western human rights activists (Human Rights Watch, 2021) and the International Court of Justice (2004) have already stated.
  For non-Westerners, Israel is not the isolated island of democracy in the midst of  numerous dictatorships, as it is often portrayed. Nelson Mandela once said that the world would not get rid of apartheid as long as it persisted in Palestine. Now South Africa has filed a lawsuit against Israel before the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention of 1948. The ICJ is currently headed by an American, Joan Donoghue, but it is considered more impartial than the politicised International Criminal Court, which has been under Anglo-Saxon influence since it was founded in 2002.
  Be this as it may, the moral damage and the damage to the image have reached a point of no return. Western countries have been caught red-handed applying double standards. They have waged war against Russia over Ukraine because it annexed provinces of its neighbour and invaded them, but they accept without a murmur that their Israeli protégé has been doing the same on the Golan Heights and in the West Bank for 50 years, blithely violating international law.
  As for Israel and world Jewry, both are in the process of losing the legitimacy and respect that the Holocaust and centuries of persecution in Europe have brought them. How can a people who have been through so much display such inhumane behaviour towards innocent children and civilians? If the commemoration of the Holocaust is no longer the selfless remembrance of the crime of crimes, but a propaganda tool used to justify an exterminatory Zionism, if the fight against anti–Semitism is no longer the just and necessary fight against anti–Jewish racism but an instrument used to legitimise a predatory state run by a corrupt leadership, then it becomes very difficult to support these causes.
  Yet this is exactly what is happening.
  For the first time in history, the global public now witnesses two wars that have the same causes – existential security concerns against a backdrop of deadly attacks, annexations, and opportunistic territorial occupations – and produce the same aggressive and deadly behaviour, but are received very differently by the West and Davos circles. [[In one case, the red carpet is rolled out for the guilty head of state (Netayjahu), but in the other, the head of state (Putin) is exiled and charged with war crimes.
  This duplicitous attitude is no longer tolerated outside Western borders. Like the Katyn massacre for the Poles, Oradour for the French, or, for Indians, the famine Churchill caused in Bengal in 1943, the images of bombed-out Gaza will haunt the Arab world for decades and weaken the fight against anti-Semitism everywhere in the world, including here.
  The price to be paid will therefore be high for both Israel and the West. The battle of the tunnels will have been won, but the war of the hearts and of the law will have been lost. In the eyes of the rest of the world, we will have turned to the wrong side of history.
  In this respect, India’s turnaround is fascinating. The day after the attack on 7 October, the country had sided with Israel – this reflecting anti-Islamist sentiment regrettably common in India and out of concern for preserving New Delhi’s good relations with the US. Then, during a little-noticed visit by Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to Moscow at the end of December, Delhi suddenly backtracked and distanced itself from Tel Aviv and Washington, reaffirmed its friendship with Russia, and returned to its nonaligned stance. In South Africa, hundreds of thousands of South Africans took to the streets at the beginning of January to protest the massacre of Palestinians. In the US, it is young people who are denouncing Biden en masse as an enabler of genocide.
  These examples show once again that the Europeans and the U.S. are no longer able to impose their narrative and that this narrative is being fiercely challenged by the countries of the South and the East, which now have their own media and an independent view of the world order. In their minds, these two conflicts, fuelled for decades by unconditional support for Ukraine and Israel, are seen as a means of delaying the emergence of a fairer and more just world order. This is a radical innovation.
  Of course, the West has not yet spoken its last word. It could reverse the trend and restore its leadership role by rebuilding peace. It would have to focus solely on cooperation instead of confrontation and on recognising its Other instead of destroying it. Nothing prevents Israel from returning the Golan Heights to Syria, living in peace with Lebanon, accepting the existence of a genuine Palestinian state alongside it or founding a binational federal state, as many Zionists had contemplated before 1948.
  And if the West. doesn’t want to negotiate with the Islamist Hamas (which, however, is only the Muslim counterpart to the ultra-orthodox Jewish extremists who populate the Israeli government), there is nothing to stop him from releasing the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, Marwan Barghouti, so that he can take over the leadership of a renewed Palestinian Authority. If South Africa could do it, why not Israel? At least that’s what Ami Ayalon, a former Shin Bet chief, recently suggested in The “Guardian.
  The situation is similar with the conflict in Ukraine. If Ukraine and NATO had agreed to engage with the Russian project for European security in December 2021, the war would never have broken out. It is not impossible to come back to this, provided that all parties sit around the table. After all, the West managed to do this in 1973 when it signed the Helsinki Agreement with the Soviet Union. But we are a long way from that. When Switzerland presents itself as the promoter of a peace summit in Ukraine by boycotting Russia, it becomes clear how pointless the project is and what an immense distance still needs to be covered to restore dialogue.
  The parameters for lasting peace are known. But no one here in the West wants to consider them. The West prefers to demonise our opponents, discredit them, deny their humanity and continue to rely on war to delay as much as possible the fateful moment when we will have to give up our claim to dominate world affairs and share power with others. A residue of hubris, no doubt, but above all an excess of weakness. We no longer have the courage or the means to dare the peace of the brave. It is this tragic inability that Emmanuel Todd’s thesis vividly illuminates: Our moral regression and our inability to solve our political difficulties other than by force, far from being consequences of circumstance, are the rotten fruits of an unstoppable and uncontrollable economic, demographic. and cultural collapse. This will be the subject of our next article.  •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-2-23-januar-2024/der-selbstmord-des-westens-und-die-herausforderungen-durch-den-sued-osten-teil-i

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In Germany, we have never seen tens of thousands of tractors blocking motorway access roads, traffic junctions and city centres! Neither the government nor its media had expected such an explosion of farmer protest.
  The permanent ecological and bureaucratic pressure on our farmers has suddenly cracked the cauldron. Instead of looking after their land and animals, farmers now have to spend almost 40% of their time on bureaucratic duties, inspections, statistics and reports at their desks.
  One of the farmers complains: “I wanted to be a farmer. Now I spend a third of my working time as a bureaucrat and two thirds of my agricultural activity following the rules of external bureaucrats, who leave me less and less personal freedom of action. I feel less and less like an independent farmer and more and more like an employee of an eco-bureaucracy!”
  More than 6000 protesters gathered in Magdeburg. But only 4000 of them were farmers with their tractors. A further 2000 entrepreneurs had come with their lorries or private cars because they were also fed up with the green economic policy and bureaucracy.
  Even a medical doctor joined in the protest: “I work like a hamster on a treadmill on a capped income – more and more patients, but more and more regulations and reports and checks that are already stealing 40% of my working time. In order to do justice to my patients, I have to sacrifice my free time to bureaucracy. I can’t take it anymore!”
  A building contractor complained: “New construction is dead because costs have risen dramatically due to bureaucratic environmental regulations, but rents are being squeezed. In addition, interest rates, wages and material costs are rising, so that I can only fulfil open orders at a growing loss. I would never have believed that it was not the market and the economy, but ideological government policy that could harm me the most!”
  Many conversations with entrepreneurs taking part in the protest were similar. In just one and a half years, the economic amateur dramatics in Berlin have apparently enraged the entire self-employed middle class with their mismanagement.
  This does not bode well for the political perpetrators: our five million entrepreneurs with their just as many spouses (= 10 million) employ 25 million people who also realise that their existence is endangered by the wrong ideological economic policy. So, if 35 million voters (out of 61 million) employed in small and medium-sized businesses and surgeries are angry, an election can only end disastrously for the traffic light party.
  The government’s behaviour is also incomprehensible in terms of electoral economics. Does it believe that German voters will agree that

• 0.9 billion euros will be saved in diesel taxes for farmers, but at the same time 8 billion euros will be spent on the war in Ukraine, which is of no concern to us?
• energy prices are tripling in Germany, not only for the economy but also for private consumers, simply because the government has cancelled cheap Russian gas on American orders and replaced it with American fracking gas that is three times as expensive?
• the 17 billion savings in Germany are offset by economic and ideological payments to foreign countries that are three times as high (from cycle paths in Peru to queer-sex aid in Asia)? The money is being dribbled into Germany and poured abroad.

So far, CDU governments have burdened the middle class in order to subsidise the banks and corporations. And the socialist governments have redistributed from the middle class to the lower class. But the fact that a government is harming the entire middle class and all voters in order to push through its eco-ideas is new.
  Like a shock, the independent middle class has realised that it can be as efficient as it wants – if the public framework is deadly, it cannot survive.
  The revolt of the middle class is about whether the middle class survives or this government.   •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-2-23-januar-2024/der-bauernprotest-mobilisiert-den-mittelstand

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here is clear evidence that US efforts to build a coalition of allies in our region is directed at containing Chinese power and developing the capability to eventually confront the Chinese military. That scenario is a nightmare for Australia. We now find certain elements of a Labor government flirting with containment and confrontation with China – instead of openly seeking to secure peace and prosperity through dialogue and diplomacy. It would be a major mistake for Labor to join the Coalition in goading and provoking our greatest trading partner and the primary source of our prosperity. That is why we have joined with former Labor Foreign Ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans in drafting the Détente Statement.

As young people we grew up in different cities; Adrian in Melbourne and Kym in Adelaide. It was the Whitlam era when Australia was beginning to find its way as a nation with our own foreign policy voice. We were impressed by the new Australian government’s identification of our place in the Asia-Pacific region. Whitlam’s 1971 trip to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao set the tone for a vital relationship now 53 years advanced.

We remember Australian domestic politics dominated by the war in Vietnam. It also saw the beginning of a new era in international relations. In America, the Republican administration of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger belatedly saw an opportunity to extricate the US from the mire of Vietnam and relieve the pressures of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Nixon followed Whitlam’s lead and travelled to China to meet Chairman Mao. Near the end of the trip, the two governments issued the Shanghai Communiqué, in which each articulated its position on a crucial obstacle to normalisation of diplomatic ties – the Taiwan issue. That diplomacy has stood the test of time.

In May 1972, June 1973, and June/July 1974 Nixon and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev met in a series of three summits to tackle the hard issues of the superpower Cold War. It was the birth of the policy of Détente. Nixon noted in his Memoirs:

“I felt that the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union would probably be the single most important factor in determining whether the world would live at peace during and after my administration … I felt that we had allowed ourselves to get in a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the Soviets.”

The summits resulted in the signing of both the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty [ABMT] and the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement [SALT]. Those hard won agreements did not end needless wars or the erosion of human rights in many parts of the world. A clear example was the Yom Kippur crisis of October 1973 pitting superpower against superpower, testing the resolve of détente. When Syria and Egypt jointly attacked Israel the Americans backed Israel; the Soviets backed Syria and Egypt. Through it all détente endured and the world has avoided major power conflict since. In the 1980s the unlikely engagement between US President Ronald Reagan and the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev reinvigorated the strategic cooperation between the superpowers.

In our 2020s world China has demanded its place in the geopolitical sun. It has already secured this in world trade forums and in the build-up of its military and strategic power in the Asia-Pacific. Some of Beijing’s recent behaviour using air and naval forces to intimidate neighbours and particularly, Taiwan, is to be deplored. As is the wolf-warrior ‘diplomacy’ that held Australia in contempt and threatened to disrupt the ties hard won and enjoyed by both sides since the Whitlam era.

However, despite the bellicose talk and minor military skirmishes it is clear Xi Jinping and the Chinese regime he dominates are looking to redefine their relationship with the United States. As is the case with Australia, where the diplomatic deep freeze has been replaced with an easing of trade sanctions and evidence of reinvigorated diplomatic ties.

We believe the preconditions for a lasting balance of power agreement, a new détente, between the US and China are emerging now. The main obstacle, at least from a western point of view, is the insistence by the US that it must maintain its military preeminence as the Indo-Pacific power. Clearly, as time passes and Chinese military power grows, the US will find it increasingly difficult to sustain that position without serious diplomatic, economic and military cost to its own role on the world stage.

There is clear evidence that current US efforts to build a coalition of allies in our region is directed at containing Chinese power. It is more than a mere containment policy. Access to new military bases in the Phillipines, new trilateral intelligence sharing and security agreements with South Korea and Japan, the QUAD arrangements and the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal with Australia and the United Kingdom are all examples of the US developing the capability to eventually confront the Chinese military.

That scenario is a nightmare for Australia. From a country seeking to shake off our colonial history and forging a new identity at home and in our region, we now find certain elements of a Labor government flirting with containment and confrontation with China – instead of openly seeking to secure peace and prosperity through dialogue and diplomacy. It would be a major mistake for Labor to join the Coalition in goading and provoking our greatest trading partner and the primary source of our prosperity.

That is why we have joined with former Labor Foreign Ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans in drafting the Détente Statement. The Statement has been endorsed by 50 well-known Australians – all who share our vision of a balance of power between the US and China. We think Australia can help broker a new détente in a common sense approach to partnership with our ASEAN neighbours. It could be our contribution, as a middle power, to finding lasting peace in an era of uncertainty and danger.

https://johnmenadue.com/australia-must-not-join-the-us-in-goading-china-to-war/

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