There are a few examples of advances in military technology that have changed the course of history. Among them were the machine gun (1884), the aircraft (1903) and the atomic bomb (1945), but no others were as significant. Today, technological advances are usually not of historic significance but many can and often do change the balances of power regionally or globally. For about a decade, Israel’s famous “Iron Dome” anti-missile system (later combined with its longer-range companion, “David’s Sling”) has been protecting Israel from rocket, missile and artillery attacks. Each battery of Iron Dome’s system is comprised of radars and four launchers each of which can fire twenty “Tamir” missiles. The two systems are reportedly at least 90% effective against those threats. Due to those systems’ effectiveness, Israelis are more secure. The obvious problem with any anti-missile system is that it can be overwhelmed by a big enough barrage. The more rockets and missiles launched, the greater their capacity to overwhelm the limited number of defensive missiles that can be fired to intercept them. The not-so-obvious problem with Iron Dome is that each Tamir missile costs about $50,000. The cost of a typical intercept is $100,000 or $150,000. Israel is a relatively wealthy nation, but those costs are not sustainable because of other demands ― social welfare programs among them ― on its budget. What may be a solution to both problems has now been unveiled. Israel’s cheap shot ― from its new “Iron Beam” laser system ― will cost about $2 for each interception. Israel announced the development of the system in early June. It is expected to be deployed next year.

Most thought that tension in the South China Sea could quickly and unexpectedly escalate, with the potential for eventual conflict. Indeed, the sense was that it was the South China Sea that required immediate attention. Tension in the Taiwan Strait with the coming presidential elections in January was also of concern, especially given Chinese naval and air activities around Taiwan. All agreed that restoring leadership communications and military-to-military relations were positive deliverables from the summit of President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the APEC conference. Also discussed was the exponential escalation of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities and the potential for conflict on the Korean Peninsula and throughout Northeast Asia. China’s leadership role in convening the Six-Party Talks with North Korea was discussed, with some commentary on the value of China again working with the U.S. to get North Korea back to the negotiating table. These and other issues were discussed, including Russia’s invasion of and war with Ukraine and Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Economic challenges, climate change and managing artificial intelligence were other issues discussed. The main takeaway from this conference was the imperative to enhance bilateral and multilateral dialogue and cooperation, with a focus on reducing existential threats and fostering regional and global stability and security. It’s important that the U.S. and China work harder at ensuring that we not only prevent any future conflict between our two countries in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait but that we ALSO collaborate to end ongoing conflicts and prevent the potential for a future war on the Korean Peninsula.

Democrats, whose party is now controlled by the hard left, have good reason to promote all this. When faith and families are strong, centralized power is less enticing, especially to a people steeped in constitutionally guaranteed, God-given rights. Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of “The Communist Manifesto.” knew what he was doing when he called for abolishing families more than 150 years ago. Mom-and-dad, married families had to be eliminated so that mega-states could rise without hindrance from a strong, independent citizenry. Marx’s vision of totalitarian socialism came to awful fruition first in Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which birthed the communist Soviet Union. Then, it blossomed in Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party takeover of Germany in 1933, eight years after he published “Mein Kampf”. It conquered China in 1949. Americans once instinctively understood the threat posed by socialism. They saw it correctly as a false religion based on envy that begins with pixie dust but ends in coercion and eventually, mass murder. China, under communist rule, bested the Soviet Union in sheer numbers of victims. Today, the Xi Jinping regime is committing genocide against its Uyghur minority and harvesting the organs of dissidents for sale. The U.N. has documented this. Xi Van Fleet has seen communism up close. She witnessed the bloody Cultural Revolution under China’s Mao Zedong, history’s most infamous mass murderer. In America, she has helped expose radical indoctrination in public schools. She sees critical race theory and sexual confusion as the spearpoint of communism. Evidence abounds that she’s right. The left is promoting transgender madness.

The growing divide in the United States isn’t merely political. It runs far deeper than that. It’s a struggle between those intent on using government and corporate power to turn America into a Marxist version of Sodom and Gomorrah and those resisting this radical transformation. Political pundits and Republican moderates who dismiss the culture war as a sideshow are missing it. A wave is building. People are awakening to the immense damage that the left is doing on all fronts and are pushing back. The destruction includes the open border and mass illegal immigration. Americans are being hit with ruinous inflation due to policies flowing from Democrats’ climate hysteria and the war on fossil fuels. Then there were the lockdowns, shot mandates and the many now-exposed inaccuracies and lies about COVID-19 from health officials. Finally, there are hideous chemical and surgical experiments on confused children by a medical establishment in thrall to transgender insanity. To understand the rapidity with which recent cultural shocks developed in America and in Europe, think of being on a roller coaster. The car is slowly hauled uphill until it reaches the apex. Then it’s released and quickly achieves breakneck speed. Since the 1960s Cultural Marxists began directly attacking marriage, family and Judeo-Christian values. In quick succession, they hatched “free love,” no-fault divorce, welfare, abortion on demand, pornification, gay rights and now transgender madness. As families unraveled, especially in the inner cities, the government grew exponentially.

China’s spies engage in social engineering, the art of using information about users’ hobbies, interests and online proclivities to trick them into revealing sensitive, protected information. Social engineering enables the most destructive cyberattacks. Chinese spies ruthlessly target business figures, particularly those in high technology, as well as government officials responsible for national security. Responding to pointed questions from members of Congress at a March hearing, Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok’s U.S. subsidiary, preposterously claimed there was a strong firewall between the American-based subsidiary and its Chinese ownership. It is worth noting that in April, China’s National People’s Congress updated a 2014 anti-espionage law to close the remaining loopholes in government control over Chinese businessmen at home and abroad. All Chinese businesses, including ByteDance, which enjoys valuable “backdoor access” to TikTok, do the bidding of Chinese intelligence ? and, ultimately, the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Consider National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone’s March Senate testimony, when he emphasized that the one-third of young American adults who get their news from TikTok or use it for entertainment purposes are effectively playing with a “loaded gun.” FBI Director Christopher Wray rang alarm bells about TikTok being “ultimately within the control of the Chinese government.” CIA Director William Burns warned that Beijing would “shape the content of what goes on to TikTok to suit the interests of Chinese leadership.”

Over the past few weeks, the social media site TikTok has spread a plethora of disinformation and propaganda, including misleading posts about the war between Israel and Hamas and the offensive viral video about Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.” Cyberspace can be a force multiplier for freedom of speech and commerce. But it turns out that the internet and social media also provide an unregulated playing field vulnerable to exploitation by our adversaries, such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, to cyberthieves and terrorists. In the case of TikTok, it is China that has us in its crosshairs. That’s because the Chinese tech giant ByteDance owns TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, including roughly 100 million in the U.S. A recent Pew Research Center study found that over 30% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 rely on TikTok for their news. TikTok hosts user-submitted videos, which might appear to have been created by a U.S. citizen or some other seemingly benign “influencer,” but might just as well be a Chinese intelligence officer seeking to twist our political discourse with propaganda in advance of the 2024 presidential election. TikTok’s multifaceted threats extend well beyond influencing public opinion with algorithms designed to learn a user’s interests, adjust content to encourage the user to use the app, and disseminate Chinese propaganda and disinformation. TikTok is also a rich source of personal information and an unmatched supplier of data to power China‘s growing artificial intelligence capabilities. When users download TikTok, they must give ByteDance access to their phone’s microphone, camera, location services, contacts and data storage.

The Biden-Kerry energy policy comes down to the fact that an American construction worker who must drive his truck a considerable distance each day is being forced to finance Mr. Putin’s war against the Ukrainian people through higher fuel prices. Until the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain was a relatively poor country, but then it opened itself to the world and established and defended the rule of law. Investors and entrepreneurs of the world took notice and flocked not only to the mother country of England but also to its colonies, where English law, customs, and financial systems took hold. By the mid-1800s, the little island of Britain had become the dominant nation of the world. But within half a century, one of its spinoffs, the United States, had a far larger gross domestic product and per-capita income. The Glorious Revolution reduced the power of the king and central government by giving more citizens a say through a real Parliament. A couple of decades later, Peter the Great decided to continue turning Russia into a great power through an authoritarian top-down model. This model has been used by communist and communist leaders in the 300 years since Peter the Great and failed in each case. The American Founders made the people, rather than rulers, supreme by using a decentralized, bottom-up governance model. In 1800, Russia (including much of Ukraine) had a population seven times that of the U.S. Now, the U.S. has a growing population that is almost double that of Russia and Ukraine combined and an average income about five times as high. Russia is no longer a population or economic giant among nations, and each year, its relative importance diminishes.

If a majority of citizens are behind a war, then they will put up with shortages of goods and services for a period of time. But after a couple of years, support usually begins to wane. The British people got fed up with the cost of trying to suppress the rebellious American colonists and pressured members of Parliament and even the king to cut their losses. The French got tired of the never-ending war in Indochina in the 1960s and were happy to dump it into the lap of the Americans, who after a decade also got tired of the effort. A generation later, American politicians had to relearn the lesson as the people got tired of the long war in Afghanistan ― as the Russians had done earlier. Vladimir Putin would be wise to heed these lessons of history and recognize that although he may wield great power at the moment, the Russian people will demand at some point that he, too, get out of Ukraine. Mr. Putin is betting that he can outlast Ukrainians and their NATO allies ― and he may win the bet since President Biden has made it much easier for him. Russia is an oil exporter, and the higher the price of oil, the more money Mr. Putin has to buy what is necessary to win the war. By waging a “war on fossil fuels,” Mr. Biden has accomplished little in curbing their use, but has driven up the price of oil to the great benefit of Mr. Putin. The losers have been lower-income people around the world. It is unlikely that Mr. Biden’s buddy John Kerry, the very rich former secretary of state and professional climate change whiner, has reduced his use of gasoline or jet fuel by even a gallon.

Demographers and economists have long known that one indication of the economic and social health of a country or region is whether the population is growing or declining. Russia has been slowly losing population since 1994, but the rate of loss has been accelerating for the last couple of years, in part due to the war in Ukraine. The situation in Ukraine, however, is much worse. It is now estimated that perhaps 10% of Ukraine’s population has left in the last two years alone, on top of steady population loss since 1992. Many military-age men in both countries have fled in order to avoid being drafted into the war. Ukraine was already at the bottom of the Eastern and Central European income scale, so the war merely provided one more nudge for those who were already considering leaving. Ukraine has been reluctant to mobilize a sufficient number of military-age men who are capable of serving, and the situation will only get worse. NATO members and other countries may well continue to give aid in the form of weapons and other materiel support to Ukraine, but there is virtually no appetite among them to put boots on the ground. Ukraine can continue to play defense with a smaller number of troops than the Russians, but it becomes more unlikely that they can wage a major offensive operation, particularly with the West rationing and delaying weapons delivery and aid, which is encouraging Russia to continue its aggression. The Russians have increasingly militarized their economy, including switching factories that were producing civilian goods to military production.

Even though the updated COVID-19 vaccines are “safe, effective,” according to assurances of public-health officialdom, Americans aren’t buying it. “CDC recommends everyone 6 months and older get an updated COVID-19 vaccine to protect against the potentially serious outcomes of COVID-19 illness this fall and winter,” reads a recent advisory from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The government agency reported that as of Nov. 17, a vanishingly small 5.4% of Americans had received the recently released 2023-24 COVID-19 jab. Even the vulnerable 65-plus cohort only logged a 31.7% vaccination rate. By contrast, 35.1% of the population has accepted inoculation for the seasonal flu. Americans are likely turning down the updated vax because the claim that the injections are “safe” remain unconvincing. More than 1 million health issues thought to be caused by the various brands have been reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as of Oct. 27, including 21,541 deaths. Moreover, questions have emerged as to whether the VAERS operation has been sufficiently staffed to manage the explosion of COVID-era adverse reports. If the federal apparatus for logging vaccine-related health problems is indeed short-staffed, Americans might not be receiving the comprehensive accounting of vax safety. As of July, 77.5% of Americans had at least one infection with the disease, reported the CDC, despite 81.4% of the population being double-vaxxed. While the vaccines may have succeeded as remedies that mitigate the severity of disease, as infection preventatives, they have certainly failed.