China vs. America: A Submarine Showdown in the South China Sea? The United States has been continuing Chinese sub-hunting patrols with its Poseidon P-8 surveillance plane in the South China Sea area. by Kris Osborn

Rival U.S. and Chinese sub-hunting surveillance assets continue to track one another in the South China Sea as part of an ongoing competition to both gain intelligence about the other and, ideally, establish some kind of maritime superiority in the South China Sea in light of ongoing tensions.

The Chinese have been operating KJ-500 airborne early warning and control systems and KQ-200 Y8 sub-hunting aircraft in the South China Sea area, according to the Global Times. 

Citing Taiwanese media reports pointing to satellite images, the Global Times quotes Chinese experts saying “China has the right to deploy defensive weapons there, according to the military threats China is facing.”  While it notes that Chinese officials have not formally confirmed the missions, the report quotes Chinese leaders emphasizing the country’s right to defend its national security interests.  

Satellite images of Chinese weapons and surveillance operations in the South China Sea are by no means unprecedented, as they have previously been identified on numerous occasions. At one point there were multiple reports of Chinese artillery, rockets and land war assets being placed in the South China Sea, as well as reported satellite images of fighters being placed in the island region. Years ago, U.S. Poseidon P-8 surveillance planes detected phony island-building, or “land reclamation” in the area, at times identifying overt Chinese efforts to build airplane landing strips on newly added territories.

Submarine operations would, of course, be of critical significance in any kind of South China Sea military engagement. The expansive shallow-water coastal areas surrounding islands in the South China Sea naturally make it more difficult for deep draft surface ships to operate in the area, perhaps apart from shallow-draft Navy Littoral Combat Ships. Submarines, therefore, can more closely approach, surveil and attack coastal regions, bringing a decided tactical advantage. Surveillance planes could also help find undersea and surface drones likely to be deployed in the region for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions or attack. 

Given all this, as part of a commensurate counter-effort, the United States has been continuing Chinese sub-hunting patrols with its Poseidon P-8 surveillance plane in the South China Sea area. It takes little imagination to envision ways its advanced sensors, sonobuoys and weapons could function as part of a containment strategy against Chinese expansion⁠—and even operate as a deterrent against China’s growing fleet of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines (SSBN). 

The extent of the Y-8s anti-submarine technology may remain somewhat of a mystery, as it may or may not effectively rival the new, upgraded U.S. P-8 Poseidon. Alongside ISR-enabled SSN attack submarines, the Poseidon seems well-positioned to help perform the U.S. SSBN sub-hunting mission for a number of reasons. Not only is the P-8’s 564 mph speed considerably faster than the P-3 Orion it is replacing, but its six additional fuel tanks enable it to search wide swaths of ocean and spend more dwell-time patrolling high-threat areas. Navy developers explain the Poseidon can operate on ten-hour missions at ranges out to twelve hundred nautical miles. More dwell-time capacity, fortified by high-speeds, seems to position the Poseidon well for covering wide areas in search of “hidden” Chinese SSBNs.

The P-8A, a militarized variant of Boeing’s 737-800, includes torpedo and Harpoon weapons stations, 129 sonobuoys and an in-flight refueling station, providing longer ranges, sub-hunting depth penetration and various attack options. Given that a P-8 can conduct sonobuoy sub-hunting missions from higher altitudes than surface ships, helicopters or other lower-flying aircraft, it can operate with decreased risk from enemy surface fire and swarming small boat attacks. Unlike many drones and other ISR assets, a Poseidon can not only find and track enemy submarines but attack and destroy them as well.

Alongside its AN/APY-10 surveillance radar and MX-series electro-optical/infrared cameras optimized to scan the ocean surface, the Poseidon’s air-parachuted sonobuoys can find submarines at various depths beneath the surface. The surveillance aircraft can operate as a “node” within a broader sub-hunting network consisting of surface ships, unmanned surface vessels, aerial drone-mounted maritime sensors and submarines. As part of its contribution to interconnected sub-hunting missions, the Poseidon can draw upon an Active Electronically Scanned Array, Synthetic Aperture Radar and Ground Moving Target Indicator.

By lowering hydrophones and a magnetic compass to a predetermined depth, connected by cable to a floating surface radio transmitter, Poseidon sonobuoys can convert acoustic energy from the water into a radio signal sent to aircraft computer processors, according to a June 2018 issue of “Physics World.”

Also, Poseidon-dispatched sonobuoys can contribute to the often discussed “US Navy Fish Hook Undersea Defense Line,” a seamless network of hydrophones, sensors and strategically positioned assets stretching from coastal areas off of Northern China down near the Philippines all the way to Indonesia, according to an essay from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called “China’s Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines and Strategic Stability.”

How the Coronavirus Escapes an Evolutionary Trade-Off That Keeps Other Pathogens in Check Symptoms often don’t appear until after infected people have been spreading the virus for several days. by Athena Aktipis and Joe Alcock

Viruses walk a fine line between severity and transmissibility. If they are too virulent, they kill or incapacitate their hosts; this limits their ability to infect new hosts. Conversely, viruses that cause little harm may not be generating enough copies of themselves to be infectious.

But SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease, sidesteps this evolutionary trade-off. Symptoms often don’t appear until after infected people have been spreading the virus for several days. One study of SARS-CoV-2 estimated that the highest rate of viral shedding, and therefore transmissibility, was one to two days before the person infected begins to show symptoms.

Put simply, you only feel ill once the virus has accomplished its evolutionary goal: to spread.

Viruses that are good at making copies of themselves, and then getting those copies inside new hosts, are more successful and become more prevalent until host immunity or public health efforts restrain them.

As professors who study evolutionary medicine, we know the trade-off between virulence and transmissibility helps keep a pathogen in check. The very destructiveness of a virus keeps it from spreading too much. This has been the case with other pandemic pathogens, including Marburg, Ebola and the original coronavirus responsible for SARS. Outbreaks that consistently cause severe symptoms are more easily corralled by public health measures because infected individuals are easy to identify. SARS-CoV-2, however, can invade communities stealthily, because many infected individuals have no symptoms at all.

COVID-19 behaves like an STI

Looking at it this way, COVID-19 resembles a sexually transmitted disease. The infected person continues to look and feel fine while spreading the illness to new hosts. HIV and syphilis, for example, are relatively asymptomatic for much of the time they are contagious. With SARS-CoV-2, recent research suggests that 40-45% of people infected remain asymptomatic. And those carriers seem able to transmit the virus for a longer period.

COVID-19 has another similarity to many sexually transmitted diseases. Its severity is not the same across hosts, and often it’s dramatically different. There is evidence that the ability to fight the infection differs among people. The severity among strains of the virus might also differ, though there is no solid evidence of this yet.

Even for a single strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus can affect people in different ways, which could facilitate its spread. The SARS-CoV-2 virus – or any other pathogen – is not deliberately changing what it does in order to exploit us and use our bodies as vehicles for transmission, but pathogens can evolve to look like they are playing games with us.

Studies show pathogens can express conditional virulence – meaning that they can be highly virulent in some individuals and less virulent in others – depending on host characteristics, like age, the presence of other infections and an individual’s immune response. This might explain how SARS-CoV-2 escapes the trade-off. In some individuals, virulence is maximized, such as in older hosts. In others, transmissibility is maximized.

Age matters

Age, so far, seems the critical factor. Older people tend to get highly destructive infections, while younger hosts, although just as infectious, remain largely unscathed. This might be because different hosts have different immune responses. Another explanation is that as we get older, we are more likely to develop other illnesses, such as obesity and hypertension, which can make us more susceptible to harm from SARS-CoV-2.

Regardless of the mechanism, this age-based pattern permits SARS-CoV-2 to have its evolutionary cake and eat it too: ravaging older individuals with high virulence, yet maintaining younger individuals as vehicles for transmission. Some studies suggest younger people are more likely to be asymptomatic. Both presymptomatic and asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus.

What do we know about the evolution of SARS-CoV-2? Unfortunately, not much yet. There is some evidence that the virus may be adapting to us as its new hosts, but so far no evidence shows that these mutations are causing changes in the virulence or transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2. And because SARS-CoV-2 may be able to circumvent the typical trade-off between virulence and transmissibility, there may be little evolutionary pressure to become less severe as it spreads.

For all the mysteries surrounding COVID-19, one thing is certain: We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security. As Sun Tzu warned in “The Art of War,” know your enemy. There is a great deal more to know about SARS-CoV-2 before we claim any victories.

It’s Time to Stop Kneeling Standing up for principle means refusing to genuflect to the current protests that seek to impose a new religion in the form of political correctness. by Sumantra Maitra

Dominic Raab, the current British foreign secretary, and the man who should have been the British Prime Minister is under incessant assault from liberal sophisticates. In a talk radio interview, Raab theorised that the current obsession with “taking the knee” (a phrase which is both syntactically erroneous and aesthetically jarring), is from the TV series the Game of Thrones, before adding that it is a symbol of “subjugation and subordination”. Pressed further, he added that he would only kneel before his missus and the Monarch, which is just about perfect for a conservative leader, as far as social propriety is concerned. Naturally, he is facing all the expected flak from the expected corners of society, media and academia.

Strangely, as more and more “conservatives” won political power everywhere in the Anglosphere, the more passive they became regarding the use of that political power. Donald Trump is isolated and incoherent, Boris Johnson is invisible and increasingly irrelevant. So much so, that watching the anarchy in Britain and America, one might be under the impression that we are living either in a failed state with no central writ or jurisdiction or worse, surviving amidst conquered people. In that scenario, Raab, however, is the only conservative leader on record in the entire Anglosphere, who not only defiantly refused the offer of an anatomical part but displayed the presence of another rare anatomical part, a spine. In his own way, he is correct about the religious dimension of the current movement. 

The current protests are a culmination of a larger socio-political movement that snowballed since 2016. Both in Brexit Britain and Trumpian America, the providential progressive march of internationalist liberalism was abruptly stopped in the same year. As nothing is worse than the shattered faith of fanatics, every single apparatus was mobilised to reverse that and ensure nothing similar happens ever again. The current protests are nothing but a continuation of what can safely be termed a transnational movement; an all-conquering religion determined to crush everything on its path. Portland has some similarities to Palmyra. To use James Lindsay’s terminology, this is a war against “Normal”. An extremely aggressive movement, complete with its own flags, holy months, and concepts of sin, trying to take over the current order, practically facing no opposition from the hapless ruling elite, half of whom are craven, and the other half complicit. 

The political divide makes it even clearer. In Britain, the soft liberal-Blairite left led by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and his cohorts kneel to appease the mob on the march (overwhelmingly white and always hyper-liberal), to erase Nelson, Napier and Churchill’s existence from British history. These are the same folks who prefer any flag, from the imperial blue EU standard to the quasi-religious rainbow, over the Union flag. Likewise, in America, Old Glory is often increasingly subservient to similar transnational currents. The appeasement to this revolutionary movement is led by the Democrats, from Presidential candidate Joe Biden to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, as Democrats under President Obama transformed from a party of American left-wing to one of transnational liberalism. In the US, the protesters want to topple Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington, while unironically waving the black and red hammer and sickle standard. 

None of the ongoing outrages has any factual basis either. Occasional police violence is due to individual factors and has been historically decreasing. Neither Britain nor America face anything even remotely akin to any form of systemic discrimination, much less racism which is structural. Otherwise, there won’t be a sea of migrants heading to the two most racist countries on the entire planet. There is no migration to India, Russia, or China. Systemic racism was last seen in Apartheid-era South Africa. Both in Britain and America a significant amount of minorities from East Asians to Indians are enormously successful, thereby proving that difference in social strata is often due to personal and cultural choices, instead of top-down discrimination. Both in Britain and the United States, the current set of revolutionary vanguards are almost overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class college-educated often indoctrinated in the radical hubs in academia. 

Revolutionary chaos almost inevitably leads to authoritarian retribution, whether through means of external conquest or due to the rise of a reactionary. If British and American conservatives continue genuflecting and refuse to stand up to the mob, it will not only display weakness to rival great powers (where any such disorder is forcibly quashed), but British and American people will vote reactionaries to restore order. But more than that, any country needs a common historically weaved narrative to exist. When there are hubs of radicalism entrenched in institutions churning out radicals en masse who are taught a simplistic understanding of history and are made to internalise that every aspect of their country is either irredeemably racist or patriarchal and exploitative, it results in a divisive toxic culture, rife for external interference. China is a lesser threat to the internal cohesion of the United States than the universities within America. 

Refusing to kneel before the mob is therefore just a start, monitoring and defunding the hubs of radicalism is the way forward. Unless stopped with political force and legislation if necessary, this movement will be fatal for the nation-state as well as for conservatism as a political concept.

Why Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula Are Unlikely to Recede North Korea wants to be accepted and recognised as a nuclear power. by L Gordon Flake

After a period of relative quiet, North Korea again commandeered news headlines with the dramatic, if symbolic, demolition of the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in the city of Kaesong, just north of the demilitarised zone.

The office was refurbished at considerable cost to South Korea following the 2018 inter-Korean Summit, and was intended to function as a virtual embassy between the two Koreas. Its destruction was an unmistakable indication of North Korea’s displeasure with its neighbour, and a dramatic end to two years of pageantry and hope.

Tensions between the Koreas have been rising after the north protested the launch of anti-North Korean propaganda-filled balloons and plastic bottles into North Korea by South Korean civic groups. Just three days before the liaison office’s demolition, Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister, specifically threatened its destruction.

North Korea, clearly sensitive to the anti-regime flyers, has abandoned expectations of meaningful sanctions relief or economic benefits from South Korea. It may also be trying to bolster the credentials of Kim Yo-jong, just months after she was speculated to be a potential successor to Kim Jong-un following rumours of his demise.

However, these alone do not fully explain what appears to be a deliberate series of actions intended by North Korea to draw attention by ratcheting up tensions on the peninsula.

To fully comprehend the current situation in North Korea, one must understand developments over the past two years. In late 2017, it appeared increasingly possible there would be some form of conflagration between the United States and North Korea.

This stemmed from a series of North Korean missile and nuclear tests that had, both in their range and demonstrated capability, convinced White House national security planners that North Korea posed an unacceptably high direct risk to the American homeland.

US President Donald Trump openly derided the North Korean leader as “little rocket man”, and threatened “fire and fury like the world has never seen”. It was this that led Kim Beazley and me to warn of the potentially dire consequences.

Instead, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, facing the risk of a conflict that could draw the Korean peninsula into war, and an escalatory cycle over which he would have little direct influence, scrambled to diffuse the situation.

Latching onto a few positive elements in Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s speech, South Korea welcomed a North Korean cheering team led by none other than Kim Yo-jong to attend the 2018 Winter Olympics.

This in turn opened the door to the full-body embrace between the two Korean leaders at the inter-Korean Summit two months later, and the Singapore-based US-North Korean Summit in June 2018.

But despite a small number of follow-on meetings, that is where the progress ended.

Trump, always more concerned with theatrics than substance, asserted a North Korean commitment to denuclearisation that was not apparent to anyone outside his administration, and returned home.

The question is, what does North Korea want?

It wants to be accepted and recognised as a nuclear power. It also wants to secure sanctions release and economic benefits, despite having reversed none of the actions or policies that led to the imposition of those sanctions in the first place.

In addition, there is increasing evidence that North Korea has not been immune from the ravages of coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps more importantly, the economic global economic downturn will also have an impact on an already weak North Korean economy.

In this context, North Korea appears to be returning to its tried and true approach of instigating international tensions as a way of forging greater domestic solidarity in the face of ongoing economic privation.

The danger now, as always, is the risk of a North Korean miscalculation, particularly in an uncertain international environment. There is evidence Pyongyang had already dismissed the US, and had no expectations for further progress until after the US elections. This latest act of aggression indicates they have likewise now written off South Korea.

Unfortunately, the longer-term questions surrounding North Korea remain unsolved by the summits with South Korea or the US. It is increasingly apparent that even if we get through 2020 without further incident, we will still be facing a North Korea that is more capable and more dangerous.

If the most recent actions are any indication, it may also be more desperate than it was when we issued a stark warning two years ago.

While America Promotes Freedom and Human Rights Abroad, We Must Uphold Those Values at Home China, Iran and others are using Washington's domestic upheaval as a line of attack. by Lawrence J. Haas

Iran is hosting an “I Can’t Breathe” international cartoon exhibition, with seventy-two pieces from twenty-seven countries, mocking America for its racial unrest and portraying its leaders and police as Nazis and Klan members.

In China, officials are blasting America for its racism while the People’s Daily, the communist party’s official newspaper, ran a cartoon of a crumbling Statue of Liberty and a White House soaked in blood and tear gas. In Moscow, Russian president Vladimir Putin said on state TV that “if this fight for natural rights, legal rights, turns into mayhem and rioting, I see nothing good for the [United States].”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, for Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow are among the world’s leading human rights abusers, and they don’t even pretend to respect the freedoms that Americans take for granted.

Tehran is crushing pro-democracy demonstrations in increasingly harsh fashion, killing hundreds and arresting thousands as recently as November, while jailing and torturing journalists, human-rights lawyers, labor leaders, and other activists. Beijing is jailing lawyers, censoring the internet, holding Uighurs in concentration camps, and curtailing freedom in Hong Kong. The oligarchs, journalists, activists, and opposition leaders who challenge Putin often wind up jailed, attacked, or dead.

Nevertheless, the autocrats’ attacks on America remind us that due to the ideals we promote around the world – freedom, democracy, equality rights, pluralism—we pay a price abroad when we don’t live up to them at home. We invite attack from our autocratic adversaries, divert attention from their human rights horrors, and make ourselves a less effective advocate for human rights.

This is no new problem. Throughout the post-war period, and particularly during Cold War, presidents of both parties argued that America must address its racism, among other reasons, to prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting it as Washington and Moscow battled for influence around the world.

“The existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries,” Dean Acheson, who was then Acting Secretary of State, wrote to the chair of the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1946, urging federal action.

Explaining, in 1957, why he sent Army paratroopers to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect black students who were enrolling in Central High School, President Eisenhower declared, “it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.”

The burden was uniquely American, as JFK argued, for neither Moscow nor any other autocratic regime felt any responsibility to protect human rights. “We are a goldfish bowl before the world,” he said. “We set a very high standard for ourselves. The communists do not . . . we preach very high standards and if we’re not going to be charged before the world with hypocrisy, we have to meet those standards.”

JFK was so focused on the global implications of America’s race problems that when the Senate Commerce Committee held hearings on his civil rights bill in July of 1963, he sent Secretary of State Dean Rusk to serve as the Administration’s lead witness and discuss its ramifications for U.S. foreign policy.

At the time, this challenge was widely recognized beyond policymaking circles. When, in 1961, “freedom riders” who wanted to ensure that public buses were desegregated in the South were beaten viciously by club-wielding mobs, the New York Times editorialized, “the United States has lost another battle in the global cold war” because people across the world will see “photographs of men beating [blacks] or other unarmed white men and women” and “ask themselves what the United States really stands for.”

During the Cold War, U.S. leaders bemoaned our racial strife in particular because Washington and Moscow were battled for the allegiance of nonaligned nations in the developing world.

Today, we stand at a similar moment. Freedom has been declining around the world for more than a decade, America has turned inward in recent years, autocrats are promoting their form of government as a viable alternative to U.S.-led democracy, and nations across the world are choosing sides.

To the many good reasons why the United States should address its race issues, here’s another: As presidents and opinion leaders of our past well knew—and as the autocrats in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran now remind us—we will be not only stronger at home but more influential abroad.

How to Avoid the Second American Civil War This November, a second American civil war could erupt when one side loses the elections and the other takes to armed resistance or looting. by Jason Pack

In politics, as in sports, defeat can be snatched out of the jaws of victory. On the surface, the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd appear to many to have accomplished demonstrable things: galvanized a productive and long-overdue national conversation, achieved prominent legislative “successes,” eliminated racist shibboleths and meaningfully moved public opinion on issues from systemic racism to qualified immunity. This sea change in discourse is nothing short of remarkable. Yet, there are structural reasons to be fearful that the opening salvo in the Second American Civil War has already been fired. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order is unlikely to assuage tensions between protestors and police. Quite the opposite. Both its framing and various historical precedents tell us to expect a hardening of the debate into two polarized camps with reason, compromise, and centrism all left by the wayside. Discussing and planning for a further escalation of violence is not alarmist or defeatist—it is, in fact, the only sensible way to avert it. 

Contemporary civil wars in geostrategically located polities have all been the inadvertent outcome of mass protest movements that misfired after successfully achieving most or all of the movement’s initial aims. Recent events in Ukraine and the Arab World present dangerous omens. Even after achieving their stated goals, post-modern protest movements have occasionally engendered the collapse of their polities—or the loss of previous freedoms as in Hong Kong. Due to their scale and ripple effects throughout society, the future of our republic may hinge upon the various structural factors at play in these #BLM protests. Right now, the fundamentals look very precarious, indeed. The protests also leave the American electoral process ripe for foreign interference.

At their essence, mass protests are symbolic demonstrations of power—a group or coalition of groups unified by a shared goal choose to gather visibly to demonstrate their potential physical or electoral force. Protests achieve their goals most sustainably when at least three out of four conditions are met: 1. Coherent leadership; 2. Concrete and immediately implementable demands; 3. Having opponents in power who can ‘read’ what the protestors want and are potentially open to compromise; 4. Support from the wider community which will grow stronger with time, the longer and more visibly disruptive the protests become.

Leaderless protests occasionally can sustain a “success” if all three of the other conditions are met—as with the Arab Spring in Tunisia. However, that is the exception which proves the rule. Generally, because leaderless protests emerge from a coalition of diverse interest groups, they fail to articulate their demands effectively. If protests are both leaderless and lack a clear achievable goal, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement or today’s protests, then they are at an enormous disadvantage—one which no amount of sheer numbers or the righteousness of their cause can compensate for. Furthermore, when facing off against opponents who do not acknowledge the protestors’ symbolic power, a protest can easily spiral out of control leading to an unintended civil war or the potential destruction of a polity—as in Ukraine.

Today’s worldwide protests presently lack any of the four conditions for protest movements to achieve sustainable change. We must remember that in the 2014 EuroMaidan protests in Ukraine, all four conditions were met and the protests still occasioned a bloody civil war, foreign intervention, and the irrevocable destruction of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

The protests of the last two weeks have unleashed an unbelievably powerful genie capable of granting nearly any wish the protestors might ask for—but for their wish to be granted permanently rather than ephemerally, the right structural factors must undergird their request to the genie. The most relevant case study to examine the role of structural factors is another example of a cross-class, multigenerational protest movement sparked by a single instance of systemic injustice which was filmed on a smartphone, which then spawned local protests, that in turn, sparked myriad copycat protests in neighboring states. That was the 2011 Arab Spring protests—whose outcomes can be divided into two rough typologies: those which faced regimes willing to listen and compromise (Egypt and Tunisia) and those which did not (Syria and Libya). In all four cases, the protestors were leaderless but had a coherent extremely legible demand “ash-Sha’ab yurido isqaat al-Nazaam” (the people demand the fall of the regime). The protestors held it on placards; they screamed and chanted it.

In the Tunisian case, the regime of Authoritarian strongman President Zayn al-Abideen Ben Ali grasped the symbolic power of the peaceful protestors. Initially, he offered them a small compromise. The protest grew. Much of the army, trade unions, and civil society had come to side with the protestors; they signaled that if Ben Ali stayed in place their support for the movement would grow further. Ben Ali heard the protestors’ message and simply left the country. In Egypt, the situation was roughly similar, although the regime attempted a violent crackdown, which backfired, causing President Husni Mubarak, who rose to power through the ranks of the military, to be abandoned by his own Army.

In Libya and Syria, the leaders were unwilling to bend. They insisted that they remained popular and refused to acknowledge the protestors’ demands as legitimate. Muammar el-Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad shot into peaceful crowds causing the protests to become militarized and take the form of violent uprisings that solicited outside military support. As his forces were hemorrhaging territory in late February 2011, Qaddafi proclaimed two mutually contradictory realities: 1) that there were “no demonstrations at all” and that ‘They love me all my people . . . they will die to protect me’; and also 2) that Qaddafi would personally oversee the hunting down of the protestors “street by street, house by house,” and massacre them.

One does not need to have devoted his life to studying Libya, to know that this story has not ended well. In Libya, the initial protestors in Benghazi were largely civil rights lawyers with well-articulated and justified grievances.  Yet, they were unable to control the outcome that they indirectly occasioned.  In Syria, the situation has been more tragic still. Peaceful protestors demanding gradual reforms were shot by the regime leading to violent uprisings organized on a largely sectarian basis which led to nearly a decade of civil and proxy war in which more than half of Syria’s population has either been killed or displaced. The well-intentioned leaderless protestors inadvertently provide an excuse for a wanna-be autocrat to destroy their country beyond recognition.

Protests are inherently sloppy as David Meyer has pointed out, but what today’s protestors really want is order, not the reigning chaos where white officers repeatedly kill blacks with impunity and then have their police unions prevent fair trails. Yet, merely having a just cause isn’t sufficient when confronting specifically intractable opponents in the White House, governors’ mansions, the Senate, state legislatures, and mayoral offices. Most crucially, many Americans will grow tired of the protestors as they will come to be blamed for the second wave of the coronavirus.

Hence, as they are currently constructed, all four of the key variables—opponent, leadership, clarity of demands, and time—are not on the protestors’ side. The United States is not Syria, Ukraine, or Libya, but if the protestors do signal clear demands after which they will disperse and the top individuals in power either refuse to accept the meaning of the protestors’ symbolic show of power, then the protest is likely to miscarry, invite foreign interference, and lead to unintended and unpredictably consequences.

No one can say how it will all end. There could be false flag operations (like a modern-day Reichstag fire or Assad bombing civilians claiming he is attacking ISIS) or terrorist attacks from insurgents, the authorities, or outside actors. There has already been reactionary vigilantism, further police brutality, and widespread vandalism. This November, a second American civil war could erupt when one side loses the elections and the other takes to armed resistance or looting.

To decrease the likelihood of the collapse of our polity, if the protestors truly desire a sustainable resolution for their justified grievances, then they must anoint a hierarchical leadership to negotiate with those state, local, and congressional authorities they feel can be trusted to reach immediately implementable compromises in exchange for dispersal of the movement. Otherwise, the recent historical precedents do not bode well for the protestors, their aims, or our polity. If, God forbid, the worst happens, then the road to a second American civil war will have been paved with good intentions.

Domestic Threats in the Era of Nationalism How significant a problem has white nationalism become? by Robert G. Rabil

As the Trump administration spotlights the anti-fascist group Antifa as the source of chaos and anarchy engulfing the countrywide protests for equal rights and justice, little, if any, has been said about White nationalists who have infiltrated the protests with the objective of creating a popular pandemonium. Surely, Antifa’s looters and anarchists, among others, should face justice; nevertheless, underestimating or turning a blind eye to the premeditated actions of White nationalists is a recipe to promote violence on a national and global scale. In fact, White nationalism as a movement has become a transnational crusade as ideologically and operationally dangerous as the Salafi-Jihadi Islamic State. 

     Recently the social media giant Facebook removed multiple account networks connected with white nationalist Proud Boys and America Guard, designated as extremist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). These groups encouraged their members to bring guns to the Black Life Matters-led protests suffusing the United States. Among the many charges facing those arrested by federal authorities, the most serious charge involved three men in Nevada linked to a far-right extremist group Boogaloo advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. These individuals and groups, though loosely affiliated, are an integral part of the white nationalist ideology that has transcended national borders and is expressed in civilizational terms.  

According to the ADL, white nationalism is a term that originated among white supremacists as a euphemism for white supremacy. Eventually, some white supremacists tried to distinguish it further by using it to refer to a form of white supremacy that emphasizes defining a country or region by white racial identity and that seeks to promote the interests of whites exclusively, typically at the expense of people of other backgrounds.  

The ADL adds that over time, white supremacists of whatever sort adhere to at least one of the following beliefs: 1) whites should be dominant over people of other backgrounds; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own “culture” that is superior to other cultures; and 4) white people are genetically superior to other people.  

Anti-Semitism is also paramount for white nationalists, most of whom believe that Jews constitute a distinctive race infused with parasitic and evil roots, bent on destroying Western civilization. These defining traits of white nationalists, who apprehensively operated on the margins of European and American societies, gradually developed into a transnational ideology congealing around their sacrosanct right of survival.  

 The central theme of their ideology can be traced to Renaud Camus’s Le Grand Remplacement [The Great Replacement] in which he argues that the flood of black and brown immigrants into the European continent will eventually amount to an extinction-level event of White native Europeans. Witnessing the impact of rising immigration to France, the emergence of subcultures, and failure of multiculturalism as an integrationist policy, Camus believes that Western societies are variably subject to “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” The act of replacement, for him, is civilizational.  

Although he denied any genetic conception of races, his literature has been picked up by far-right and white nationalist groups throughout Europe and the English-speaking world. However, these groups added to Camus’s central theme of Great Replacement a variation of concepts meant not only to widen the popular base of white nationalism but also to infuse it with an actionable immediacy. For example, Richard Spencer, a public face of white nationalism, embraced Camus’s arguments, though identifying himself as an Identitarian. Although the term has also French roots in the work of Alain de Benoist, Spencer’s ilks used the term in a utilitarian fashion to deflect racial superiority and underscore the differential right in diversity. In other words, Identitarians claim the exclusive right to their own culture and territories in the face of what they perceive the gradual act of civilizational replacement. 

The intellectual defense against this existential identity threat had been expounded by French journalist Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (2010 in English); The Colonisation of Europe (2016); and Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (2019). Faye lambasts Western liberalism and unrestrained immigration, which has taken a form of massive colonization settlement of the West by peoples from the Global South. He harshly criticizes European leaders for helping bring the demise of Europe and asserts that Islam is carrying out a hostile takeover both of France and Europe.

Faye’s arguments, complementing those of Camus and Benoist, have become an infallible script of white nationalism. Spencer, along with Greg Johnson, has been promoting Faye’s arguments and open about the influence of Faye on his thinking as an identitarian. References to Faye and Benoists appeared regularly in the alt-right and pro-Donald Trump forums on Reddit and 4chan. Steve Bannon’s alt-right Breitbart has promoted their work, too. According to Southern Poverty Law Center, “there has been an observable shift at Breitbart.com to an outright embrace of white-nationalist ‘Identitarian’ movements across the continent. And that, in turn, has meant that propaganda from these movements has been transmitted whole to its readers across all its platforms, including the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Thanks to this cross-pollination of ideas going back to the history of slavery white nationalism has transformed into a malleable global ideological crucible in which radical movements and slogans are churned out to stop this Great Replacement. Today the most referred slogan for white nationalists is the “14 Words.” The slogan states: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”  The other widespread slogan that has become a rallying cry and a catchphrase on fliers is: “You Will Not Replace Us.”

During the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, organized by Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, Jason Kessler, Augustus Invictus, Baked Alaska and others, demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us.” The event was ostensibly asserting the legitimacy of white culture and supremacy.  

One of the earliest violent manifestations of white nationalism was carried out by the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik who perpetrated Norway’s biggest massacre since World War II. Hours before the deadly attack in January 2017, Breivik e-mailed a 1,500-page manifesto to 5,700 people, titled 2083—A European Declaration of Independence. In the document, Breivik, proclaiming himself a savior of Christianity, attacks multiculturalism and the threat of Muslim immigration to Norway. In October 2018, Robert Bowers opened fire during Shabbat services, at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, killing eleven and wounding seven. This was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history on a Synagogue known for helping immigrants.

Similarly, the March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, amounted to the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. The perpetrator Brenton Tarrant was reportedly radicalized when he traveled to Europe. He felt taken aback by the omnipresence of immigrants, their crimes and the paralysis gripping the dispirited native populations, who, he considered, are dying out. He also issued a manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement.”  

Steeped in anti-Islam, the manifesto refers to nonwhites as “invaders” who threaten to “replace” white people. Tarrant confessed to using guns so as to frighten people and create conflict, especially in the United States over gun laws, as well as balkanizing the United States into warring racial factions. Significantly, he argued in the manifesto that: 

The radicalization of young Western men is not just unavoidable, but inevitable. It should come as no shock that European men, in every nation, and on every continent are turning to radical notions and methods to combat social and moral decay of their nations and the continued ethnic replacement of their people. Radical, explosive action is the only desired, and required, response to an attempted genocide.

Tarrant’s manifesto is unequivocally a testament to the transnational spread of white nationalism’s ideology and the urgency to stop the act of civilizational replacement. This act of terror was followed by another attack on an American synagogue in Poway, California. On April 27, 2019, John Timothy Earnest entered the Chabad of Poway synagogue on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Approximately one hundred people were inside the synagogue. Earnest shot and killed one person and wounded the Rabbi of the congregation before his rifle jammed. A massacre was avoided. Earnest issued a manifesto that blended historical anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism and racism. Wrapping himself in the mantle of Christianity, Earnest faulted the Jews for their endless crimes against God and humanity and for committing a genocide against the European race. He wrote: “It is unlawful and cowardly to stand on the sidelines as the European people are genocided around you. I did not want to have to kill Jews. But they have given us no other option.” 

No sooner, in August 2019, Patrick Crusius, twenty-one years old, entered the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire on shoppers at a packed Walmart store, killing and wounding scores of people. The El Paso shooting was one of the most brutal assaults on Hispanics in U.S. history. Crusius also issued a manifesto “The Inconvenient Truth” explaining his act of terror. Confessing his support of the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto, Crusius asserted that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas . . . They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion. . . . Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read the Great Replacement.” 

He added that “The inconvenient truth is that our leaders, both Democrat and Republican, have been failing us for decades. They are either complacent or involved in one of the biggest betrayals of the American public in our history. The takeover of the United States . . . I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.” 

Surely, it is from this fount of white nationalism’s ideology and urgency to save White society and culture that extremist groups and individuals emerged, such as the accelerationists, including the Boogaloo, to take it upon themselves to hasten a race war following which they hope to triumph over the Jews, blacks, browns and Muslims to the exclusive purity of their white culture.  

This is the background against which extremist groups within the crucible of white nationalism are trying to exploit the ongoing protests for equal rights and justice to bring about their racial war. Their actionable ideology is a logical outgrowth of white nationalism, which has become a transnational civilizational movement intellectually and operationally armed with a determination to stop through varying means what they consider the extinction event of the Great Replacement. Consequently, white nationalism has become an existential threat to all minorities in White societies, a threat as ideologically driven as Salafi-jihadism. 

To be sure, the threat of white nationalism has not yet become clear in some of the corridors of power in Washington. Tragically, it is being intentionally or unintentionally fed a domestic and international ethno-nationalist diet of sorts, which has served as a legitimatizing fodder to its ideology. From the banks of the Indus river in India to the Pannonian basin in Hungary to the Great Wall of China, to the banks of the Potomac river political leaders and activists have defended their policies in ethnic and/or nationalist terms congruent with the ideological underpinnings of white nationalism. The Trump administration has to take note not only of Antifa’s threat to society but also of white nationalism, which has transcended borders and congealed around a racist sacrosanct right to exclusively exist at the expense of all non-whites. Otherwise, a racial war may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.