North Korean Narrative: Decades of Deception

When global observers began to draw hope from talks between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the United State’s President Trump, it was the first time in many years that the world saw rational diplomacy with North Korea as possible. To understand the significance of those talks in 2018 and 2019, the reader will want to review North Korea’s actions during the previous decade or two.

From 1948 to 1994, the leader of North Korea was Kim Il-sung. Upon his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il became the leader. In 2011, Kim Jong-il died, and his son, Kim Jong-un, became the country’s leader.

North Korea is now suffering under its third hereditary totalitarian absolutist dictator.

Having been born in the mid-1980s, Kim Jong-un has been treated as a near-deity his entire life. This may explain why other nations have difficulty conducting any diplomacy with his government.

For the neighboring countries of Japan and South Korea, the nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea constitute an existential threat. North Korea obtained nuclear capability during the reign of Kim Jong-il. It is typical of the Kim dynasty that observers characterize its behavior by comparing it to a toddler who tosses his dinner during a temper tantrum. President George W. Bush recalls:

On the Fourth of July 2006, Kim Jong-il threw his food on the floor. He fired a barrage of missiles into the Sea of Japan. The test was a military failure, but the provocation was real. My theory was that Kim saw the world focused on Iran and was craving attention. He also wanted to test the coalition to see how much he could get away with.
I called President Hu Jintao of China, told him that Kim Jong-il had insulted China, and urged him to condemn the launch publicly. He released a statement reiterating his commitment to “peace and stability” and opposing “any actions that might intensify the situation.” His words were mild, but they were a step in the right direction.
North Korea defied the world again by carrying out its first full-fledged nuclear test. President Hu’s reaction was firmer this time. “The Chinese government strongly opposes this,” he said. “We engaged in conversations to appeal to the North Koreans for restraint. However, our neighbor turned a deaf ear to our advice.”

The world had to accept the suboptimal reality that a third-generation hereditary dictator now had nuclear weapons at his disposal. This was a nightmare scenario for South Korea and for Japan. It was horrifying for the rest of the world.

North Korea had proven that it was willing to deceive. It had agreed to stop its efforts to build an atomic bomb, and yet continued to do precisely that. North Korea proved unrepentant when, four years prior to its first successful nuclear weapon test, the U.S. intelligence community presented evidence that the weapons program was well under way. At that time, the U.S. Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld, who later wrote:

By July 2006, well over a decade of U.S. negotiations with North Korea and its erratic leadership had yielded little benefit to the United States. North Korea continued to test and launch ballistic missiles, bluster about attacking South Korea, and develop nuclear weapons, detonating what intelligence professionals believed was a low-yield bomb in October 2006. We had confronted North Korean officials in 2002 with the fact that we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment effort, in violation of the Clinton Administration’s “Agreed Framework.”

Ever willing to present deceptive images to the world, North Korea, after having demonstrated its capabilities both in terms of building bombs and in terms of building delivery systems, proceeded to claim that it was going to disassemble its own nuclear production facilities.

In a visible and publicized action, the North Koreans demolished a nuclear facility. This action was, however, meaningless, as Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney writes:

On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.

In yet another about-face, North Korea again wanted to boast by displaying its advanced nuclear weapons technology. Two years after claiming to have destroyed their own nuclear capability, they bragged about a multi-year effort coming to fruition.

Around this time, the world grew both wise and weary, and learned that words and statements from the North Korean government were meaningless, and that the North Korean leaders were incorrigible and could never be trusted, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reports:

In 2010, nuclear physicist Siegfried Hacker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, would be invited to North Korea and shown an industrial-scale facility capable of producing enriched uranium. According to Hecker, the state of the facility demonstrated “without a doubt” that Pyongyang had pursued uranium enrichment for many years. We’d been right about uranium enrichment but unable to use diplomacy to confirm our suspicions or do anything about it.

By 2013, North Korea was clearly and unapologetically presenting itself as a nuclear power. Missile tests were performed, not to test the technology of the rockets, but as timely signals to the international community.

By that year, also, Kim Jong-un had become the national leader, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. The new leader demonstrates “increasing ruthlessness” against anything except immediate enthusiastic affirmation of his own ideas, according to a 2013 article in The Telegraph.

The ambiguous, sometimes friendly, and sometimes hostile relationship between the United States and China was and is pivotal in forming a global response to North Korea’s bellicose behavior. While North Korea has good relationships with no other nation on earth, its connection with China is as close as North Korea can come to working diplomatic relationship.

The U.S. has often requested Chinese assistance in dealing with North Korea. While China certainly doesn’t like or trust the Kim regime, it also is not willing to do or be anything which might make China seem like it is in any way helpful to the U.S.

Yet China has, at times, been willing to be strict with North Korea, as Robert Wampler wrote in 2013:

One key issue is how China might convince Pyongyang to dial back its provocations lest they escalate into military conflict. Although current consultations between Washington and Beijing are taking place behind closed doors, we do have a window into how the United States assessed China’s options during a similar crisis nearly two decades ago — options that included Chinese troops crossing the Yalu to secure its borders.

Also in 2013, analyst Edward Luttwak raised this question: could South Korea be enabling North Korea? As counterintuitive as such a question might at first seem, it makes a certain amount of economic sense.

South Korea has given, at various times, substantial chunks of hard foreign currency to North Korea — sometimes as a way to buy some peace in a sort of mafioso protection racket, sometimes in response to sheer bullying. Serious currency is one thing which North Korea both desperately needs and can hardly obtain.

The North Korean economy is so weak that it’s constantly on the verge of collapse — even as a few elite members of Communist Party live in luxury. South Korea seems oddly to be throwing a lifeline to the very nation which is bent on destroying it, as Luttwak writes:

All of North Korea’s varied and extreme economic dysfunctions converge in its crippling shortage of foreign currency. Once the bulk of it is used to import military components, supplies, and subsystems from China (including the erector launcher vehicles for its ballistic missiles), very little foreign exchange is left.

While the world’s diplomats focus on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, ordinary citizens around the world are perhaps more horrified by the human rights abuses which constitute domestic policy in the country. Frank Jannuzi argues that perhaps the diplomats should take a cue from people:

The best way to resolve the ongoing nuclear crisis is to stop talking about nukes — and instead focus on advancing North Korean human rights, reorienting global attention from the North’s plutonium to its people.

The question of atomic weapons and the question of human rights in North Korea intersect when one examines the ideology and psychology of the Kim regime. The world has seen any number of communist totalitarian dictators, but the Kims are another category altogether.

The Kim family takes — and expects other people to take — its deity seriously. The Kims expect to be worshipped, praised, and given credit for every good thing. North Korean citizens are expected to thank the Kims for good weather and for any recovery after a time of illness, as Doug Bandow reports:

In North Korea, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are demigod the father and demigod son; Juche is the political gospel. Writings of the Kims are treated as scripture. Which helps explain the North’s position as the world's worst religious persecutor.

It is difficult to understand, and difficult to believe, the mindset which pervades North Korea. If one can understand this mindset, and if one can believe that it is in fact firmly rooted both in the collective North Korean psyche as well as in the North Korean diplomatic corps, then one faces the question: Is it possible to negotiate with this nation? If so, how?

For this reason, many of the world’s diplomats — from a diverse range of countries — had and have more or less given up on any attempt at serious diplomacy with this country.

And that is why so many were shocked at President Trump’s greatly increased efforts at achieving diplomatic progress with this nation.

What will be the ultimate outcome of Trump’s efforts? What will be the fruit of his administration’s diplomatic overtures to North Korea? Time alone will reveal what Trump will or will not achieve: either a great accomplishment or a disappointing fizzle.

In any case, North Korea will remain an object of world attention for some time to come.

North Korea is characterized by a determined and incorrigible drive toward building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal; by a persistent and consistent violation of many human rights; and by a culture which has absolutized and deified the Kim dynasty.

The role of the Kim family in North Korean society exceeds, e.g., the role of the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, the role of Louis XIV in 17th-century and 18th-century France, or the role of Stalin and Mao in the 20th-century communist dictatorships.

Diplomats from nations all around the globe, who can otherwise interface with the most monstrous regimes and with the most horrific tyrants, find it difficult to interact with North Korea’s unpredictability, irrationality, and incomprehensibility.

For this reason, among others, President Trump’s attempts to reach a working relationship with North Korea are fascinating.

Kidnapping China’s Leader: Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an

In late 1936, China was defending itself against two lethal enemies. Externally, it was being attacked by Japan. Internally, it was being attacked by Mao’s communists. The leader of China, Chiang Kai-shek, had to make difficult decisions about allocating resources.

How many soldiers and how much equipment should be sent to fight against Japan? Likewise, how many soldiers and how much equipment should be sent to defend the country from the communists?

In December 1936, Chiang was in the city of Xi’an. Suddenly, two of his own bodyguards kidnapped him.

In return for the release of Chiang, they demanded not money, but rather a change in government policy. They insisted that China’s government use more resources for the defense against Japan, and fewer resources for the defense against Mao’s communists.

The net effect of the incident was that a temporary truce or ceasefire was declared between the Chinese people and Mao’s communists. The legitimate Chinese government and the communist terrorists would temporarily work together to fight against the attacking Japanese.

The two individuals who seem to have been most directly responsible for physically keeping Chiang Kai-shek under house arrest were his bodyguards. But the leading minds behind the operation were members of Mao’s communist gang.

One of the leaders of the operation, and one of the negotiators who presented the communist demands to the government, was Zhou Enlai. During the following decades, Zhou Enlai would rise with the communists, and inside the communist hierarchy, to be second only to Mao himself.

This made Zhou Enlai responsible for millions of deaths.

During Chiang’s captivity, he got to know Zhou. Suffering perhaps from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, Chiang developed a trust in Zhou. Years after the incident, Chiang would indicate that he felt that Zhou was a trustworthy individual, as historian Jay Taylor writes:

In 1941, Chiang would tell Owen Lattimore that he considered Zhou “personally trustworthy although he was of course under Yan’an’s control.” Years later, Chiang, obviously referring to Zhou, wrote that at Xi’an he believed that the Communists, meaning of course Zhou, had “repented and were sincere.” Although sometimes Zhou echoed Mao’s cynicism about Chiang’s belief in his own sincerity, later events would suggest that Zhou did believe and would argue within the CCP that if Chiang lived up to his commitments at Xi’an, the Communists should give priority to fighting the Japanese under the broad but real leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.

Sadly, Chiang had confided this view with Owen Lattimore, who turned out to be a Soviet asset.

Historians debate about the ambiguous aspects of Lattimore’s status: Was he a paid operative for a Soviet intelligence agency? Or was he unwittingly manipulated into acting in ways that benefitted the Soviet Socialists? Was he an actual spy? Or did the USSR simply trick him, exploiting Lattimore’s socialist sympathies?

In either case, Chiang’s admission to Lattimore was doubtless quickly transmitted to Moscow, and from there to Mao’s communist roughians. Mao would exploit Chiang’s weakness for Zhou.

In any event, Chiang was in a difficult situation: to adequately defend the nation against Japan, he would need to reduce his defenses against Mao’s communist bandits; in order to adequately defend China against Mao’s communist raiders, he would have to reduce his defenses against Japan.

China seemed doomed.

Chiang did not know that when he spoke to Owen Lattimore, he was speaking to an agent working — wittingly or unwittingly — for the Soviet Socialists.

In the final outcome, it may not have made a huge difference: the communists seemed destined to dominate China.

This much is clear: when the communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, conquered China, the result was 20,000,000 deaths within the first decade, and several million more deaths in the next decade.

A note on spelling: because these names are transliterated into the Roman alphabet, alternate spellings abound: Mao Zedong is Mao Tse-Tung; Zhou Enlai is Chou En-lai; Chiang Kai-shek is Jiang Jieshi or Chiang Chieh-shih or Chiang Chung-cheng; Xi’an is Sian. Variations in spelling have no impact on meaning.

Whither China: Can Humaneness Take Root?

Since U.S. President Richard Nixon first established diplomatic with communist China in 1972, sinologists have watched China for signs of increased respect for human rights. (‘Sinologists’ are scholars who study China.)

Observers have hoped that increased interaction with other nations would nudge China toward developing a more free society. These hopes have been dashed sometimes, and been confirmed sometimes.

China’s legacy of atrocities and genocides included the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1962 and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ from 1966 to 1969.

The ‘Great Leap Forward’ culminated in a manufactured famine which caused the deaths of approximately fifteen million people (some estimates range as high as thirty million).

The ‘Cultural Revolution,’ despite officially ending in 1969, caused painful ripple effects until 1976, causing the deaths of between 500,000 and two million Chinese, and several million more Tibetans.

The question, in the wake of Nixon’s diplomacy, was whether China would become more humane. The results were at best mixed. Occasionally gestures toward civil rights alternated with the events like the Massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which several thousand people died, or with the bullying of religious minorities like Christians and Tibetan Buddhists.

By 2015, journalists Chen Guangcheng and Melanie Kirkpatrick could write:

China often punishes its critics by abusing their relatives; Chen’s family was no exception. Over the years, his wife was assaulted, his daughter was forbidden to go to school, and a nephew was jailed. Some family members and close friends advised him to give up his work. “I felt misery about the pain my family had suffered,” he writes. “[But] I firmly believed — as I still do — that if you bow your head before the Communist Party, it will soon make you get on your hands and knees, and next it will stomp on your crouching body until it destroys you.”

Until 2015, China also pursued its ‘one child policy,’ forcing women to undergo forced sterilization and forced abortions.

Chen never says what motivated him to be the voice of the voiceless in China. He invokes “heaven” from time to time, and he remains faithful to Chinese traditions such as praying at the graves of ancestors. He makes no mention of God or religion. What his deeds make abundantly clear, though, is his belief in the sanctity of life and his great compassion for the sick, those with disabilities, and the unborn.

Moving toward the third decade of the twentieth century, the nations of the world looked to mass protests in Hong Kong in mid-2019 to see if there were any signs of what would come next: Whither China? Oppression or freedom?

Founding Civilization in Brazil

Although Brazil was discovered in the year 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, it remained largely uncivilized and undeveloped for several centuries. Brazil’s first advancement happened when the queen of Portugal temporarily moved her capital to Brazil from 1807 to 1814.

The capital had been relocated because Napoleon threatened the safety of Lisbon, Portugal’s permanent capital city.

Around the same time, and perhaps partly for similar reasons, the first groups of German-speaking settlers brought cultural development to Brazil, as Thomas Sowell writes:

Substantial German immigration to Brazil, as to South America in general, began early in the nineteenth century and included over the years not only immigrants from what is now Germany, but also sizable numbers of Germans from Russia, Switzerland, and Austria.

The reader might be puzzled at the phrase ‘Germans from Russia,’ but from the mid-1700s forward, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to parts of Russia, hoping to make a new home there. Russia’s low literacy rates and weak economic infrastructure, however, caused many of these Germans to move on to other countries.

In 1818, a group of Germans settled in Ilheus. In 1819, another group settled in Sao Jorge. When Brazil became politically independent from Portugal in 1822, the new nation’s government worked to entice Germans to live in Brazil.

Most settled in the southern part of Brazil, concentrated in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the first enduring German agricultural colony was established in 1824, though earlier unsuccessful attempts to establish German colonies in Brazil go back to the late eighteenth century.

Among the first Germans to make their home in Brazil, farming was a dominant activity. Later waves of Germans settled in cities instead of in the countryside, and became entrepreneurs, merchants, technical innovators, craftsmen, and industrialists.

Settlements of Germans, in groups numbering in the hundreds or the thousands, continued to be made in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.

By the end of the twentieth century, almost a million Brazilians used German as their primary language at home; almost three million speak German. There are villages which operate primarily as German-speaking communities.

Over the decades, the flow of Germans into Brazil enabled the development of technology and commerce. The Germans were, and are, leaders in medicine, the arts, and the economy of Brazil.

China’s New Imposing Military Bases: Artificial Islands in the South China Sea

In its expanding empire, China had begun to exert colonial control — even without formal colonization — in places like Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), and Sri Lanka. The muscle used to intimidate these and other regions into compliance is in part military and in part economic.

In a novel development, where no convenient land base for its military is present, China has begun the construction of manmade islands as bases for weapons and soldiers. Already in 2014, Robert Kaplan wrote:

Take the Spratlys, with significant oil and natural gas deposits, which are claimed in full by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and in part by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei. China has built concrete helipads and military structures on seven reefs and shoals. On Mischief Reef, which China occupied under the nose of the Philippine navy in the 1990s, China has constructed a three-­story building and five octagonal concrete structures, all for military use. On Johnson Reef, China put up a structure armed with high-­powered machine guns.

When a superpower like China creates an island where none had previously existed, stocks that island with troops and missiles, and then makes claims on the waters in the region and on the shipping lanes through them, then nations like Vietnam and Malaysia can rightfully speak of extortion.

The nations around the South China Sea hope to offer some resistance to the Chinese, as Robert Kaplan reports:

Taiwan occupies Itu Aba Island, on which it has constructed dozens of buildings for military use, protected by hundreds of troops and twenty coastal guns. Vietnam occupies twenty-­one islands on which it has built runways, piers, barracks, storage tanks, and gun emplacements. Malaysia and the Philippines, as stated, have five and nine sites respectively, occupied by naval detachments. Anyone who speculates that with globalization, territorial boundaries and fights for territory have lost their meaning should behold the South China Sea.

While these nations are to be admired for struggling against the expanding Chinese imperialist power, they cannot stand alone against China and survive. With its large labor force and large manufacturing base, China is building missiles and battleships at a rate which these smaller nations cannot match.

The behavior of China in the South China Sea is parallel to the behavior of Athens in the Aegean Sea, as revealed in the ‘Melian Dialogue’ section of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

When Chinese hegemony over the South China Sea is complete, it will control one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, and will be able to greatly influence the world’s economy, thereby affecting nearly every nation on earth.

Xi Jinping and His Vision of China As the Leader of a New World Order: Capabilities in Cyberwar, Space War, Conventional War, and Economic War

The current reign of Xi Jinping in China marks a high point in the consolidation of power and control. This can be seen de jure by the large number of official titles he has amassed for himself: Secretary General of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Chairman of the National Security Commission of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission, Chairman of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, Chairman of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, and many others.

He holds all of these offices simultaneously. Like Louis XIV in France, Xi Jinping would be correct if he said, L’etat, c’est moi: ‘I am the state.’

Aside from the official titles, it is simply the case de facto that Xi is a dictator and an absolutist.

Robert Maginnis, as an insider in America’s military intelligence agencies, finds a quote from Steven Mosher accurate:

Dr. Steven Mosher, author of the 2017 book, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order, said: “Xi Jinping is the new Chairman Mao, a thoroughly Communist dictator who has managed to seize control of the Party, the Army, and the Government. The new Red Emperor, as we should call him, is likely to be in power for decades to come. And he is not our friend. He is carrying out a new Cultural Revolution in China. Communist Party leader Xi’s China ‘Dream’ is the world’s nightmare. Xi ‘dreams’ of overturning the current U.S.-led world order and replacing it with [a new world order] … dominated by China. A world dominated by China would be less free, less democratic, and less safe, not only for Americans, but for the Chinese people themselves. Xi believes that international law and agreements are, as he has said, just ‘waste paper,’ or better put, ‘toilet paper.’”

As an uncontrolled autocrat, Xi Jinping poses a threat both to the Chinese people and to the global community of nations at large. It is clear that diplomacy is meaningless to Xi, and that negotiated treaties with him are a futile exercise, as Robert Maginnis writes:

China’s constitutional change to make Xi Jinping president for life is a harbinger of the authoritarian nation’s direction and a strategic threat to America.

To be sure, between Mao and Xi, China has had a number of leaders, all of whom demonstrated a relatively high degree of authoritarianism and absolutism. But Xi represents a zenith of those qualities, even in China.

It is easy for diplomats from other nations to misunderstand the situation in China, because the degree of autocracy and of a willingness to deceive are so extreme that the situation is non-intuitive for emissaries from other countries. Robert Maginnis quotes from a report given to Congress by Admiral Harry Harris:

“China has taken advantage of our openness,” Harris told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2018. “Our hope in the past has been that if we bring China into organizations like the World Trade Organization and include China in our military exercises and the like, and that somehow China will become like us.”

“The reality is that’s simply not true. China has taken advantage of our openness … to continue the path that they’ve always been on and we’re seeing that play out now in 2018. Certainly over the next 20 years or so that will be a concern,” Harris said.

Even while engaging in seemingly amiable talks with other governments, China is preparing for a variety of offensive scenarios. One outline goes like this: a three-pronged operation in which, simultaneously, China’s attack satellites would disable several U.S. satellites, instantly reducing communication, GPS, and logistical coordination capabilities; would hack into and disable computer networks on the ground in the United States, further handicapping transportation and communication, and crippling our economic infrastructure; and would move its armed forces into the South China Sea, an occupation which the U.S. would then be powerless to challenge or resist.

In such a scenario, China would have gained control of what is arguably the world’s single most important shipping lane, and have obtained hegemony over the nations around the South China Sea: Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc.

Admiral Harris explained that Beijing seeks regional hegemony and intends to oust America from Asia. It is developing the means to do that via systems such as the hypersonic glide weapons and stealth fighters. Besides, the admiral expressed concern about China’s militarization of islands in the South China Sea and its acquisition of icebreaker ships, although it has no Arctic coast.

China’s pronounced military buildup in recent years has a double motive: on the one hand, it can use massive armed forces to gain by threats and extortion what it wants, and so dominate without firing a shot; on the other hand, China is more than willing to go to war to achieve its objectives, and will use its military that way if necessary.

Beyond the South China Sea, Xi Jinping’s ambitions extend to Africa and beyond. Among smaller, less-developed “third world” nations, China’s tactic is a Mafia-like racket. It begins with China offering to help one of these nations with infrastructure project: building roads, dams, hospitals, water and sewage systems, electrical generating plants, etc. Such nations can’t afford to pay for these items, so China generously extends credit. When the nations are unable to make the payments on the loans, China offers to “forgive” the debt in return for placing permanent military bases in these nations, in return for rights to ship into, out of, and through these nations, and in return for exclusive rights which lock other nations out of what by now has become a vassal state.

Water Becomes Political: Nobody Need Thirst

Water is the world’s most abundant resource. Lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds - not to mention rain - water crops around the world. Fresh drinking water is more available than ever before. Even oceanic saltwater - once thought irredeemably unpotable - is now subject to desalinization at ever shrinking prices.

Why, then, would any human being not have enough water to drink?

Yet it is the case that water is in some places scarce - even to the point at which lives are lost.

The problem is not the amount of water on the planet - there’s more than enough of that. The problem is politics.

While most of the human race has plenty of fresh clean water, people are thirsting and even dying in specific places: (1) nations with socialist or communist governments, (2) Islamic republics, and (3) nations with notoriously corrupt governments.

It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between “Islamic republics” on the one hand, and “Muslim majority” or “majority Muslim” nations on the other.

In any case, water shortages are unnecessary, as author David Wallace-Wells writes:

Today, the crisis is political — which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix — and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development. There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it. Some cities lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even in the United States, leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16 percent of freshwater; in Brazil, the estimate is 40 percent.

A political problem demands a political solution - not an engineering or climatological one.

An infinite amount of pipelines and wells will not solve the world’s water problem; neither will gerrymandering human behavior to impact the climate.

Only when a nation has a government which has at least a modicum of respect for human life - only then will the water problem be solved.

China’s Two-Pronged Strategy: Cyber Warfare and Military Buildup

In the early twenty-first century, foreign policy analysts have paid a great deal of attention to China, even if the news media and public at large failed to do so. On those rare occasions when China was the focus of news coverage, the topic was often trade agreements.

The analysts, however, are more concerned about China’s teams of hackers, and about China’s military buildup.

China’s cyberwar teams have gone beyond mere theft of intellectual property. They now focus on disruptive techniques to take American systems offline entirely.

China’s physical military has constructed islands out of concrete and cement in the South China Sea. These islands are home to sophisticated weapons and radar systems, as well as bases for soldiers, as Jim Sciutto writes:

By the mid-2000s, China’s national effort to steal US technology and state secrets was already in high gear and logging up enormous successes in both the public and private sectors. In 2014 China defied both international law and the laws of physics to manufacture entirely new sovereign territory in the middle of the South China Sea, beginning construction of a string of man-made islands in waters claimed by several of its Southeast Asian neighbors. China was also expanding its military capabilities and military footprint from under the waves all the way into space, with the express intention of surpassing the United States and — if necessary — defeating the United States in war.

What’s at stake? Here’s one of many possible scenarios: China could activate its killer satellites to destroy several American satellites. This would cause disruptions in all manner of telecommunication, paralyzing the military, the government, and the businesses of the private-sector economy. Next, China’s hackers overwhelm or otherwise crash major computer systems, further paralyzing the nation and potentially causing permanent loss of data.

Finally, with the U.S. paralyzed, the Chinese military would be positioned in the South China Sea to carry out a sort of piracy or extortion. Passing freighters would be made pay cash or a fraction of their cargo to pass through was are supposed to be free international waters.

Estimates state that perhaps between 30% and 40% of the world’s cargo shipping passes through the South China Sea. Any nation which could control that region would have a stranglehold on the global economy.

Not only have the media failed to inform the public about Chinese threats, but even officials inside the U.S. government often fail to assess or respond to China’s slow-motion aggression, as Jim Sciutto reports:

Inside the US government and the intelligence community, these aggressive steps were first missed and then downplayed. US officials, led by President Barack Obama, accepted China’s assurances it would not militarize its man-made islands in the South China Sea — assurances Beijing reneged on almost immediately. Obama would later accept Chinese assurances that Beijing would dial back its cyber theft of US corporate secrets, malicious activity that remains rampant and aggressive today. Even after finally acknowledging these acts of aggression, many US officials and policy experts continued to portray them as short-term or easily reversible.

As serious as other situations may be — Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan, etc. — China has the potential to easily become a much graver danger than any of the others.

Yet media reporting and government diplomats fail to emphasize the seriousness of China’s long-range plans to dominate not only the South China Sea, but larger segments of the global economy. Smaller ‘developing’ nations in Africa and Asia have already fallen victim to China’s program to reduce them to vassal states.

China offers to help these nations with large infrastructure projects (roads, dams, etc.). When these ‘third-world’ countries are unable to pay the ensuing debts, China offers to ‘forgive’ the debt in return for the rights to permanently station Chinese military units in those nations, and in return for rights to in, around, and through those countries.

Under this pattern, called the “Belt and Road” initiative, China would dominate both world trade and transportation. This goal has been deliberately articulated among the highest levels of Chinese leadership.

One possible response to China would be for American leaders to publicly explain China’s tactics and goals, to create a global awareness. The leaders of many nations could be expected to unite on this matter, even if they disagree about many other topics.

New Global Configurations: The Hostile Beginning of the Millennium’s World Order

Early in the new millennium, a type of book began to appear with increasing frequency. This set of books offered a fresh analysis of the global diplomatic situation.

Exemplary of this category were Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan, which underscored how little attention was being paid to southeast Asia by the mainstream American news media; The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China’s Secret Operations to Defeat America by Jim Sciutto, which pointed to the coordination of seemingly unrelated events; The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury, which encompassses a longer view of China’s global ambitions; and The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David Sanger, which highlights the relentless, constant, and hidden cyberwar unfolding across the globe.

Although two of these works contain the word ‘America’ in their subtitles, none of them are parochial in perspective. The systemic patterns which they reveal will interest readers in Zambia and Chad, in Paraguay and Bolivia, in Cambodia and Thailand.

Neither are these books overly sensationalistic, although their publishers may have titled and marketed them with passion.

The picture which emerges from these books is that any and every nation around the globe is under constant cyberattacks. Every country must therefore be engaged in cybersecurity and countermeasures.

This ceaseless cyberwarfare is no mere harassment, but can be quite deadly, and is also coordinated with economic pressure and occasionally with direct military action. This ongoing conflict is invisible and largely ignored by the news media.

While huge amounts of media coverage were and are devoted to Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea, actions undertaken by the much larger aggressors - Russia and China - go unreported by newspapers and unchallenged by world governments, as Robert Maginnis writes:

A major factor in the new great power competition is the leadership at the helm of these countries. Both China and Russia are headed by autocrats who test international order just as the United States seems to be losing its way.

China and Russia carefully watch any response to their espionage and weaponized cyber activity. When they see little or none, the increase such efforts. Robert Maginnis continues:

In the fact of this confrontation, the West seems feckless at stopping Putin’s and Xi’s great power ambitions, efforts driven by their authoritarian personalities and evidently accepted and cheered by their domestic power bases.

The nations of the world need a greater degree of awareness, both about China’s and Russia’s plans and goals, and about the consequences which the world would endure, should those goals be realized.

China’s “Belt and Road” strategy includes selling technology and construction projects to ‘emerging’ third-world nations. When those nations can’t pay the debts incurred by those purchases, China offers to ‘forgive’ the obligations in return for permanently stationing Chinese military in those nations, and in return for trade and transportation rights being given to China in, around, and through those countries.

The global community of nations also needs to form a steady resolve to resist, and to engage in countermeasures against, cyber aggression and economic extortion by Russia and China.

Spain’s Conviviality: How It Ended

The 711 A.D. marks a turning point in the history of Spain. Prior to that year, a diversity of people lived peaceably with each other.

The cultural diversity included Germanic Goths, Romans, native Celts, and Semitic individuals from the Middle East. The linguistic diversity was composed of Latin, Germanic dialects like Gothic, Hebrew, and Celtic. Religious diversity consisted of Jews, Christians, and a few reclusive adherents of Celtic paganism.

These groups coexisted in a largely amiable way. Certainly they did not agree with each other on all points, but there was no large-scale conflict or violence among them.

The year 711 A.D. would change that.

An Islamic invasionary fleet landed on Spain’s southern coast. The officers were largely Arabic; the soldiers and sailors were mainly recruited from the Berber population of northern Africa. As historian Dario Fernandez-Morera writes, “Spain was conquered and colonized by the forces of the Islamic Caliphate.”

To make their intentions clear, the Muslim officers burned their ships after the invasionary force had landed on the beaches. The message to the soldiers was clear. There was no option for retreat. The only way to survive was to defeat the inhabitants of Spain.

“The conquest was carried out by force,” as Fernandez-Morera notes. After conquering large portions Spain, the remaining portions sometimes chose to surrender and submit to a life of dhimmitude. The word ‘dhimmitude’ describes a non-Muslim who has been allowed to live in an Islamic region; the non-Muslim must agree to an inferior status as prescribed by Islamic law.

The Islamic invaders burned Jewish synagogues and Christian churches. The rules of dhimmitude, sometimes referred to as the ‘Pact of Umar,’ prevented non-Muslims from wearing certain types of clothing or constructing any house or building of significant size.

Even if they had to endure the humiliation of Islamic ‘Sharia’ law, many of the Spaniards chose to surrender to the Muslim armies, so that they could at least live and hope for the eventual liberation of Spain:

The Muslim conquerors used force to defeat the resistance of the Christian Visigoth kingdom, a nascent civilization. But they also granted pacts to those Visigoth lords and Christian leaders who saw it as advantageous to accept the offered “peace” and become dhimmis (those Christians and Jews living in sub­altern status in Islamic lands) rather than face the consequences of resisting. Behind the “peaceful pacts” was always the threat of brutal force.

Thus began several centuries of “religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the marginalization of certain groups — all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities.” Spain was not fully liberated until 1492.

But neither was Spain fully subjugated. The Spaniards resisted. Some parts of northern and northeastern Spain were never defeated by the Islamic armies. The Spaniards defended those regions successfully.

Even in the regions which were occupied by the Muslim armies, many Spaniards risked their lives by secretly engaging in acts of defiance, meeting to carry on their religious traditions.

Austria’s Place in the World: Mutating from Century to Century

The modern nation of Austria is geographically smaller than Germany or Poland, and a bit smaller than Hungary too. Austria’s population is likewise smaller than the populations of Germany, Hungary, and Poland.

In previous centuries, however, Austria was bigger in terms of geography, in terms of population, in terms of world influence, and in terms of historical importance.

During the early Middle Ages, Austria did not exist as a concept. Rather, a number of smaller kingdoms which occupy the area which is now Austria functioned semi-independently of each other. Starting in the 700s and 800s, the region came under the influence of the Frankish Empire, which would later be known as the Holy Roman Empire (HRE).

In the late 1200s, the Habsburg family rose to power within the HRE, and would remain in power until 1806. The Habsburg dynasty was an Austrian family, and so the Austrians took control of the empire which had at first been an external influence on Austria. The Habsburg dynasty would develop influences reaching as far as Spain, and therefore be at least the nominal head of nearly all of Europe.

The rulers of the HRE did not have absolute power like the earlier Roman emperors or the later French monarchs. Their reigns were contingent on forming a consensus among a group of electors, called Kurfürsten, of whom there were approximately six.

So for nearly a thousand years, Austria’s identity was that of a loosely connected collection of kingdoms within the HRE, but forming a significant power bloc in the empire because, for the last five centuries of that millennium, the ruling dynasty had its family roots in Austria.

A significant change in Austria, as well as throughout the rest of Europe, happened in 1806. Napoleon’s French army was on a rampage. He was attempting to make himself ruler of all Europe – as well as parts of Africa, Asia, and the Near East. Napoleon, despite some early brilliant victories, failed decisively. In the aftermath, however, the HRE was dissolved.

Austria emerged as its own standalone empire, allied for the most part with the various Germanic kingdoms which would later combine to form Germany. But in the 1860s, Austria pivoted away from those alliances, and formed new alliances, primarily with Hungary. Hungary had been a territory under the rule of the Austrian Empire, but became a proper part of the empire in the 1860s. This new entity was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Also incorporated into this new empire were parts of Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Serbia, as well as all of Bohemia, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bohemia would later be known as the Czech Republic. Austria also included Tyrol, part of which is in modern-day Italy.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was large: it included approximately 240,000 square miles of territory, compared to Austria’s area of 32,382 square miles at the beginning of the 21st century.

The Habsburg dynasty retained control, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a major political, diplomatic, economic, and military player in European affairs.

Prior to 1900, people rarely confused Austria with Germany. But today, partly due to sloppy education in American high school History classes, such mixups are common, as historian Lonnie Johnson writes:

Austria is often almost exclusively associated with its imperial past or frequently confused with Germany. Germany began to play a much more important role in Europe at about the same time that Austria gradually lost influence in European affairs towards the end of the 19th century.

For nearly all of its existence, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was ruled by Francis Joseph I, or Franz-Josef I. He was coronated as Emperor of the Austrian Empire in 1848, and became Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867. He reigned until his death in 1916.

Because of his long reign, Franz-Josef was influential, well-known, loved by many, and hated by some.

When World War I ended in 1918, the empire was dissolved. Austria became a standalone country without an empire, assuming its present geographical boundaries. The Republic of Austria lasted from 1919 to 1933, when it ended abruptly by means of external and internal Nazi takeovers.

At the end of World War II in 1945, Austria’s future was in peril. It seemed as if the Soviet Socialists would enslave Austria as they had enslaved Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other eastern European nations. The Austrians, however, managed to buy their freedom from the Soviet Socialists. The Soviet army, which had occupied much of Austria in 1945, left in 1955, and the Austrians gave the Soviets $152 million dollars and ten million metric tons of crude oil.

The modern nation of Austria has a complicated past, and unless the details of this past are studied, misunderstandings abound, as Lonnie Johnson notes:

With the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, Austria assumed a role in Europe comparable to its radically reduced size, and this is one explanation for the fact that so many Austrians associations tend to predate World War I. They have the faded charm of old photographs and awaken nostalgic or sentimental feelings about the good old imperial days of Strauss waltzes, operetta, or the grandfatherly emperor Francis Joseph. Associations with Germany, on the other hand, are frequently as harsh as a 20th century newsreel: World War I, Hitler (incidentally one of the most frequently disclaimed Austrians), World War II, the Iron Curtain, or the Berlin Wall. However, if these historical associations are not present in one way or the other, Austria is nowadays sometime[s] confused with Germany or demoted [in people’s imaginations] to the status of being some kind of a German province.

At the beginning of the 21st century, then, Austria shares a language with Germany, but also has huge cultural influences from Serbia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The daily customs and cultural life grow out of a shared past with other German-speaking regions, but modern Austria, especially the eastern half of the nation, is socially and ethnically shaped to a significant degree by the Slavic regions of eastern Europe.

Austria has its own distinct identity. Students of history and culture will note the differences, and anyone walking the streets of Vienna will not confuse them for the streets of Berlin.

The Slow-Motion War Between Russia and Ukraine: The Church Stands for Freedom

When the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, Ukraine again became an independent sovereign nation. But its independence was endangered from the start.

During the Soviet Socialist era (1917 to 1991), and during earlier Czarist times, Russian ambitions included Ukraine, which Russia thought to be its possession. During the years in which Gorbachev held office in the USSR, and during the years in which Yeltsin held office in post-Soviet Russia, the Russians seemed, if not friendly, then at least a bit less hostile to Ukraine.

Since Vladimir Putin took office in Russia, however, his policies, reminiscent of the older Soviet Socialist policies, have been more aggressive, including the 2014 military occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.

Working for Barack Obama, diplomat Victoria Nuland urged that the United States and the European Union together take a firm stance against Russian aggression. The credibility of Obama’s and Nuland’s diplomacy dwindled, however, when it was discovered that they were meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics.

Obama and Nuland were using their positions in the United States government to interfere in questions which were Ukraine’s to resolve.

Nuland further undermined relations between the US and EU when she dismissed the EU’s ability to be helpful in the Ukraine situation.

Inside Ukraine, the Orthodox Church took on a renewed significance as the Russians escalated their threats. In a December 2018 edition of the Wall Street Journal, James Marson reported:

For 27 years of Ukraine’s independence, its only internationally recognized Orthodox Church was controlled by Russia, a pillar of the Kremlin’s continued influence in its former vassal.

But 4½ years into an armed conflict against Russia and separatists in the country’s east, Ukraine on Saturday founded its own national church, endorsed by the foremost leader of global Orthodoxy.

The church, an essentially spiritual institution, would not allow itself to be an instrument of Russian foreign policy. The creation of a Ukrainian church manifests the church’s alliance with the oppressed, despite the oppressor’s attempt to use the church.

Although the event was formally the creation of a new church, it was more a redefinition of an already-existing church. Both the clergy and the members of the new church are largely from the old church, as James Marson writes:

“We will get out from under Moscow’s hoof,” said Viktor Kolesnyk, a 67-year-old retiree who was among several thousand people gathered near St. Sophia Cathedral, where bishops from three Orthodox churches met for a Unification Council.

The creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is a signature victory for U.S.-backed President Petro Poroshenko, whose country has lost control over parts of its territory in the conflict, which has left more than 10,000 people dead. Mr. Poroshenko, who faces an election in March, told the crowd that “today we finally attained our Ukrainian independence from Russia.”

The assertion of the church is a “setback for” Russia’s “Putin, who has used” Russia’s and Ukraine’s “shared cultures and pasts to justify his efforts to keep Ukraine in the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.”

The Russian-backed church leadership had “long been a proponent of close ties with Russia, supporting politicians favored by Moscow.” The priests and ordinary members of the church refused to endure such political influence in the church.

Russian influence in the church directed church leaders to give “vague statements calling for peace without condemning Mr. Putin.” Now, the true nature of the church emerges, favoring no political agenda. Churches, and groups which merely claim to be churches, routinely call for peace and justice. But to make concrete steps toward those noble goals, the church must deliberately distance itself from the ghosts of Soviet Socialism and its imperialist desires.

The Orthodox Church survived over seventy years of Soviet Socialist persecution. Despite the surveillance, imprisonment, beatings, torture, and murder of both church leaders and ordinary members, the church did not surrender its belief in Jesus.

The era of Putin presents the same challenges. The church is responding with the same steady conviction. The ability of the church to endure, and to continue advocating for the oppressed, derives from its understanding of Jesus.

Muslim vs. Muslim: Turkey’s Ambition to Be the New Ottoman Empire Fuels Violent Clashes with Saudi Arabia, Repeating the Wars of Previous Centuries

A map of the world deceptively divides Islam into a number of various nation-states. These divisions function like administrative districts, and are sometimes vehicles for the ambitions of their respective rulers. Islam itself is the primary unit.

“The long struggle for supremacy in the muslim world,” as Yaroslav Trofimov phrases it, must be understood as a sort of civil war within Islam. What seems to be a conflict between nation-states is in fact an intramural dispute. Within the Islamic world, the concept of ‘nation-state’ may not apply at all.

Islam unifies the Muslim world, as a social, political, and military movement. Islam functions primarily this way, and less as a meditative personal spirituality.

In these civil wars within Islam, “Turks and Saudis have been enemies for centuries.” The city of Jerusalem has been fought over, besieged, defended, and conquered many times over the centuries. The bloodiest battles for Jerusalem involved neither Christians nor Jews, but rather occurred when one Muslim army sought to take the city from another Muslim army.

Two Islamic armies, the Seljuk Turks on one side, and the Egyptian Fatimids on the other, fought each other several times for control of Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslim soldiers killed each other, and the city changed hands back and forth (e.g., in 1071 and 1098) between the two warring factions.

Recounting a “gruesome episode in the shared history of Turkey and Saudi Arabia,” Yaroslav Trofimov recounts how,

two centuries ago, in the fall of 1818, the Saudi monarch was brought to Istanbul in chains. He was displayed in a cage to the cheering crowds outside the Hagia Sophia mosque, and then, amid celebratory fireworks, his head was chopped off.

In the long history of warfare between Turkey and Saudi Arabia - or, sometimes, between Turkey and the House of Saud - the beheading of the Saudi king is merely one instance. This particular beheading, one of many, happened after

an Ottoman expeditionary corps comprised mostly of Turkish and Albanian soldiers seized the Saudi capital of Diriya, on the outskirts of Riyadh, on Sept. 11, 1818. The city was razed. According to a Russian diplomatic dispatch, the Turkish sultan then had the captured Saudi ruler, Abdullah bin Saud, escorted to Istanbul, alongside the chief Wahhabi cleric. After the deposed Saudi monarch was beheaded outside the Hagia Sophia, his body was propped up in public for three days with his severed head under his arm. (As for the Wahhabi imam, he was sent to Istanbul’s bazaar for beheading, the diplomat reported.)

Throughout much of Islamic history, the chief rivals have been the Muslims of Turkey, i.e., of the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, struggling against the Muslims of Arabia or Saudi Arabia. The terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’ are used, and the lands of Iran and Iraq are mentioned, but the internal dynamic of Islam is often more dominated by Turkey and Arabia than by those other segments.

The Turks had mounted their 1818 attack on their fellow Muslims because,

in Ottoman eyes, the Saudis were bloodthirsty murderers who had plundered the holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, slaughtering 4,000 civilian inhabitants (most of them Shiite), and later destroyed many shrines in Mecca and Medina.

By the time the Turks beheaded the Saudi king in 1818, Muslims had been slaughtering each other for over a millennium. Since then, the pattern has not changed. “The long legacy of rivalry between the two Sunni Muslim powers,” notes Jaroslav Trofimov, “has fueled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s determination to punish the House of Saud.” The wars of past centuries live on in the Muslim mind, and fuel today’s violence.

This, of course, is also the role that the House of Saud sees as its natural right because of the kingdom’s control over Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, and over the hajj pilgrimage that brings more than two million Muslims there each year.

Iran and Iraq are major objects of interest on the global scene, but inside Islam, they aren’t the main contenders.

In this contest, Iran — whose Shiite version of Islam represents a small minority of the predominantly Sunni Muslim world — can’t really compete. For now, Tehran is happy to watch from the sidelines as its two main regional rivals undermine each other.

From an outsider’s perspective, it is easy to get the impression that Islam’s hatred is directed toward Europeans and Americans, toward Jews and Christians. But a more careful look at the Muslim world reveals that Muslims direct huge amounts of hostility toward each other.

In addition to warfare and assassinations, it’s worth noting that a great deal of Islamic terrorism targets competing Muslim groups. Again, the outsiders may assume that Islamic terror is aimed primarily at Europeans, American, Jews, and Christians. But insiders see it differently.

Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has tried to assert Riyadh’s ambition to lead the Middle East ever since his father ascended to the throne in 2015. In a major departure from Saudi Arabia’s previous policy of behind-the-scenes checkbook diplomacy, Prince Mohammed has built a coalition of Sunni states such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to launch a war against Iranian allies in Yemen. He imposed an embargo that unsuccessfully sought regime change in Qatar. He also attempted to meddle in Lebanese politics by forcing that nation’s prime minister to announce during a stay in the kingdom that he would resign, a decision that the prime minister rescinded once he was home.

The maneuvering and scheming for power and influence continues nonstop among the Saudis and the Turks. Neighboring countries are pawns in this power struggle.

A number of organizations who operate in both politics and terrorism serve as further tools which the rivals use against each other. To identify these groups as either ‘terror groups’ or ‘political parties’ is to miss the point that the two are inseparable and interrelated in this context. “Saudi Arabia and its allies also have relentlessly pursued the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement,” writes Trofimov. Typical of such groups, the Muslim Brotherhood is linked to other terrorists: “its affiliates include Hamas.”

Though professing a commitment to democracy under Islamic law, the Brotherhood has turned autocratic when in power in Egypt and Sudan. Mr. Erdogan has supported the group across the Arab world since the 2011 revolutions of the Arab Spring.

As the leader of the Turkish government, Erdogan is willing to use his connections with terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to attack the Saudis.

Mr. Erdogan has made several efforts to resist Saudi Arabia’s rise. He sent Turkish troops to protect Qatar, ousted Saudi allies from Somalia and announced a deal to lease an island across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia in Sudan, possibly for a military base. He has also become a vociferous champion of traditional Muslim causes, such as Palestine, and of new ones, such as the suffering of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Istanbul has turned into a favorite hub for Islamist dissidents from across the Arab world.

Erdogan hopes to win the long struggle and become the leader of Islam. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire saw itself as the rightful government of the Muslim world. Erdogan wants to draw on that older attitude. Turkey is the modern remnant of the Ottoman Empire.

But the Saudis also see themselves as the rightful leader of Islam. So the same contest continues. Only the names change.

“The Turkish president’s foreign policy strategy aims to make Muslims proud again,” said Soner Cagaptay, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of a recent biography of Mr. Erdogan, “The New Sultan.” “Under this vision, a reimagined and modernized version of the Ottoman past, the Turks are to lead Muslims to greatness.”

There is a long history behind that claim. For four centuries, the sultan in Istanbul was also the religious leader, or caliph, of the entire Muslim world. His spiritual authority was recognized well beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire, which at its peak included parts of central and eastern Europe, north Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

In previous centuries, the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire fought with the Muslims of Arabia for a chance to be the leading force within Islam. In the twenty-first century, Turkey is fighting against Saudi Arabia. The fight remains the same; the names have changed.

There was an interval, however, when it seemed like the situation might get better. When the Ottoman Empire ended, around 1923 or 1924, a modern Turkey started to emerge under the leadership of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, a popular president of the country. During Ataturk’s time, Turkey began to shed the rigid demands of Islam. The harsh demands of Sharia law were relaxed, and a modern trend made itself felt in education and politics.

Turkey seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. Ataturk ended the Caliphate, the Islamic notion of imperial government, and the country moved toward rule by freely-elected representatives. Freedom of speech and modern universities were starting to emerge. Ataturk’s dream didn’t include wasting lives and energy fighting with the Arabs for control of Islam.

Sadly, Erdogan’s effort have been to do the very opposite of Ataturk’s. Erdogan is working to reinstate the harsh oppression of Islam in every area of live and society.

The Arabs did not engage in the type of modernization that Ataturk brought to Turkey:

The caliphate was abolished only in 1924, six years after the Ottomans lost control over Mecca and Medina to a British-sponsored Arab revolt during World War I. The modern, secular Turkish Republic, which rose from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat by the Allied powers, banished the last sultan, Mehmed VI, to Europe in 1922. With the Ottomans gone, the House of Saud quickly expanded from its desert strongholds to much of the Arabian peninsula, first capturing Mecca and then establishing a powerful new state in 1932.

With Turkey pursuing a modernized path, and Saudi Arabia clinging to the strict enforcement of Islam, the two nations could peacefully coexist, because they were each pursuing different goals. They weren’t in competition.

Until Mr. Erdogan’s embrace of neo-Ottoman politics — and more authoritarian rule — a decade or so ago, the modern Turkish state wasn’t much interested in leading the Muslim world and was content to leave religious proselytizing to Saudi Arabia. Turkey joined NATO, sought membership in the European Union and nurtured close military links with Israel.

But when Turkey abandoned modernization, and Erdogan began to instate an oppressive Islamic regime, Turkey and Saudi Arabia came into conflict: they were in competition, each wanting to be the source of leadership in Islam.

Mr. Erdogan’s new Turkey, by contrast, presents a major challenge to Saudi Arabia by offering an alternative Islamic model, said Madawi al Rasheed, a Saudi professor at the London School of Economics and the author of a history of Saudi Arabia. “It is an existential threat to Saudi Arabia because of Turkey’s combination of Islam and a kind of democracy,” she said. “After all, Erdogan is still ruling over a republic that has a parliament, opposition parties and a civil society — while Saudi Arabia has nothing like that.”

Erdogan has not been able to erase all traces of modernization. Those remaining fragments of modernity give Turkey an edge over Saudi Arabia. But how long can those shreds of modernization last under Erdogan’s imposition of strict Islamic social and political concepts?

While Turkey seems to be sliding back into the darkness of Islamic oppression, Saudi Arabia seems never to have left it.

Indeed, today’s kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a monarchy as absolute as they come. It’s also the third state run by the House of Saud since the family’s alliance with the puritan preacher Mohammed ibn Abdel Wahhab rallied the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula under the banner of an uncompromising new creed (since known as Wahhabism) in 1745.

Understanding the conflicts within Islam is essential for understanding the past and present of the Muslim world. Europeans and Americans can tend to think of themselves as the primary target of Islamic hate, but Muslims are often more likely to be the victims of Islamic terrorism than Jews or Christians.

Pivotal Points in Islam’s Assault on Europe: When Did the Tide Turn?

Historians debate about exactly when it became clear that Europe would not collapse under the weight of ongoing Muslim attacks. In 711 A.D., Islam made its first major invasion into Europe, conquering most of Spain.

“The notion of historical turning points has proved irresistible: especially, of late, the watershed between expansionist Islam and” defensive Europe, as historian Colin Thubron writes. The decisive turning point could have been the Battle of Tours, or the fighting around Vienna. Both battles featured outnumbered European defenders offering brave, and ultimately successful, resistance to invading Muslim troops:

This crucial event has been assigned inter alia to the Battle of Tours in 732, where the Frankish leader Charles Martel turned back the Moorish army flooding across France, and variously to the siege and the Battle of Vienna (in 1529 and 1683), which checked the Ottoman advance into Eastern Europe.

So which is it? Tours or Vienna? When was that moment at which it was clear or inevitable that Europe would survive, and that Islam would fail to destroy Europe?

The Battle of Tours was certainly significant: Charles Martel turned back the Muslim army which had been flooding across France.

The fighting around Vienna was also significant: the defending Europeans stopped the Islamic advance into eastern Europe.

Colin Thubron offers a third option. The big turning point might have happened in the Mediterranean, at Malta and at Lepanto. To understand the military actions at those two places, a bit of background is necessary. The setting takes place between

1565 and 1571, when the Ottoman Turks pushed westward across the Mediterranean. Their empire was then at its height. They had absorbed Egypt and almost the whole North African littoral; to the east they were battering on Persia, to the north threatening Vienna. Over the Mediterranean itself — ancient Rome’s “center of the world” — the imperial Turkish navies and their corsair auxiliaries were spreading terror down the coasts of Italy and even Spain. But lying strategically across their path, in a pendant below Sicily, was the tiny island of Malta.

From Malta “the Knights of St. John, soldier-monks” offered resistance to the Muslim navies.

In those years, Islam had expanded westward across the Mediterranean; the Muslim navies attacked the coasts of Italy and Spain.

Malta was one small point of resistance, a place which refused to allow Islamic armies to invade and occupy.

The great turning-point in the Mediterranean may have happened at two points of resistance: Lepanto and Malta.

Malta’s survival of the great Ottoman siege in 1565 was to become one of the redemptive epics of Christendom. And a greater one was to follow. In 1571 the western Mediterranean powers — Spain, Venice, the Papacy — united at last in fear, put an end to Turkish maritime expansion at the horrifying Battle of Lepanto.

The Muslim siege on Malta in 1565 and the Muslim attack at Lepanto in 1571 were two major military offensives. Again the Europeans were outnumbered and on the defensive. Their survival showed that Europe refused to collapse in the face of attacking Muslim troops.

A Complex Set of Texts: Foundational Documents and Conflict in the Muslim World

It is at least an oversimplification, and more probably simply wrong, to reduce Islam to the Qur’an (“Koran”). There are several texts which are foundational to Islam as a socio-political vision.

Scholar Timothy Furnish describes the textual basis for Islam:

For Muslims two authoritative poles of religious reference exist: the Qur'an, and the Sunnah plus the Hadith (Arabic plural Ahadith). The Sunnah is the customary practice of the Islamic community as derived from the actions and words of the prophet Muhammad.

For the practical purposes of Islam, i.e., sorting out the details of Sharia law, and especially the non-negotiable core of Sharia, which is called Hadd or Hudud, Muslim scholars must rely on the primary texts.

But not all primary texts are viewed with equal trust. It is the task, and the conflict, of Islamic scholars to rank these various texts in terms of their reliability.

Hadiths are narrative accounts of the these same actions and pronouncements, rather like “hearsay” records of what Muhammad did and said. Hadiths are not the word of God in the sense that the Qur'an is, but they are of only slightly lesser importance. They were almost certainly orally transmitted for some time before being redacted in the first few centuries of Islamic history. A specialized field of hadith criticism and analysis developed as a means of sorting the wheat of legitimate traditions - that is, ones that ostensibly truly went back to Muhammad - from the chaff of forgeries.

The opportunity both for ambiguity and for dispute is apparent. Because Islam in practice is more of a socio-political program than a personal meditative spirituality, points of textual interpretation are less about conceptual abstractions regarding the nature of the deity, and more about concrete details of communal living.

More than a millennium’s worth of armed conflict within and between Muslim communities fuels, and is fueled by, the prioritization of one text over another.

The complexities of Islamic politics cannot be explained by the Qur’an alone. Any student of Islam must survey a much broader variety of principle texts which form an underlying basis.

Systems in the Past: Arrangements in Former Times

One prominent textbook is titled World History: Patterns of Interaction, and with two good reasons. First, the actual events of history manifest certain deep structures which recur: archetypes. Second, the human mind and the structure of its consciousness is designed to find patterns.

The study of history will inevitably include the comparison and contrast of one situation to another. Generations of students and teachers alike have labored under the burden of essays written in response to a prompt to “compare and contrast.”

Writing about these patterns, scholar George Will gives several examples, including

Mancur Olson’s seminal The Rise and Decline of Nations, which explains how free societies become sclerotic. Their governments become encrusted with interest groups that preserve, like a fly in amber, an increasingly stultifying status quo. This impedes dynamism by protecting arrangements that have worked well for those powerful enough to put the arrangements in place. This blocks upward mobility for those less wired to power.

One pattern, then, combines the accumulation of ossified bureaucracies with class of individuals who make ambitious careers, not by creating things of value, but rather by skillful navigation of bureaucracy: an essentially parasitic arrangement.

This pattern, in which a small but increasing percentage of society gets a paycheck and social advancements, not by contributing something to the community, but rather by exploiting the system, can be seen in the later phases of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the British Empire.

A second pattern in history emerges when the reader becomes acquainted

with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis — how incentives influence behavior — to government. It shows how elected officials and bureaucrats pursue personal aggrandizement as much as people do in the private sector. In the public sector’s profit motive, profit is measured by power rather than money.

In a nation governed by freely-elected representatives, i.e., a ‘republic’ in the strict sense of the word, there is a consistent temptation for those in power to represent themselves instead of the voters. Societies hope to avoid succumbing to this temptation, in part by hoping for representatives of good character, and in part by imposing mechanisms like term limits and the separation of powers.

This is, of course, a corollary to Lord Acton’s famous principle about how power corrupts.

An example is seen in the etymology of the word ‘administrator,’ which originally meant one who supplied assistance and materials to another. Yet in modern bureaucracies, an administrator often denotes a supervisor rather than an assistant. The origin of the verb to ‘administer’ means to ‘help.’

A third pattern deals with the government’s “ever-deeper penetration into society.” One might justify increasing governmental domination by arguing that it

serves equality. Actually, big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

So, even in those instances in which governmental intervention into society is done with the best and most altruistic of motives, it serves only to create a sort of aristocracy.

Consider governmental anti-poverty measures. Not only do they fail to end poverty, but rather, they end up increasing poverty. Along the way, they also create an elite of bureaucrats and politicians who manage the ineffective anti-poverty measures, and who make entire careers out of doing so.

A fourth pattern emerges in situations in which the government is seen as the dispenser of favors. Instead of competing in the free market to see who can offer good work for a good wage, citizens compete for government benefits.

Citizens form groups which lobby for legislation which favors their profession or their geographical region of the country; demographic segments hope to influence policymakers and enjoy the benefits of government funding or loopholes in regulations.

Instead of working together to contribute to their civilization, citizens are pitted against each other by the notion that the government is a provider:

Of course Americans distrust one another more as more and more factions fight one another for preferential treatment by government. Of course government becomes drained of dignity, and becomes corrosive of social cohesion, as it becomes a bigger dispenser of inequality through benefits to those sufficiently clever and connected to work its levers.

When citizens compete with each other, hoping to nudge the government’s policies into one direction or another - directions, naturally, which favor them - cynicism abounds. Governments and their leaders are no longer trusted, but rather, citizens hope to manipulate governments, even as the citizens are aware that the government is attempting to manipulate them.

Trusting the government less, and competing with each other, the citizens finally trust each other less.

Not only do we “tend to trust our institutions less,” we also “tend to trust each other less.” Of course there are parallel increases in distrust: Government’s dignity diminishes as government grows to serve factions of those sophisticated at manipulating its allocation of preferences. Social solidarity is a casualty of government grown big because it recognizes no limits to its dispensing of favors.

Given the consistent manifestation of the law of unintended consequences, the increase of governmental action yields only harm. Anti-poverty measures increase poverty; anti-crime programs increase crime; peace programs lead to violence; educational programs lead to illiteracy.

The only way forward is to limit or trim government, as George Will notes:

Suppose there were not 16 government agencies “to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways.” Suppose there were none. Such barnacles on big government institutionalize the scramble for government favors; these agencies are a standing incitement to bend public power for private advantage. Hence they increase distrust of government, diminish social solidarity and aggravate the most indefensible inequality — that driven by government dispensations.

These patterns recur on all six inhabited continents, over the last 6,000 years of recorded history, uniformly across different languages, religions, and cultures. These are the ‘patterns of interaction,’ seen in the reign of Gaozu, also known as Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty in China, and in the reign of Wang Mang, who overthrew Gaozu’s descendants several generations later.

These patterns are seen in the Merovingian Dynasty’s ascent, when it unified and energized the Franks in the former Roman colony of Gaul, and in the Merovingian Dynasty’s decline, when it became complacent and allowed Charles “the Hammer” Martel to do the royal work, and therefore gain the royal title.

Santayana’s all-too-often quoted epigram might give rise to yet another variant. Even if one does remember the past, one might still have to repeat it.