It won’t be long now before the Middle East breaks into major war, the majority of likely U.S. voters told Rasmussen in a recent poll. That’s the Joe Biden effect - a White House rooted in weakness, setting the stage for a world on edge, ushering in plenty of opportunities for hostile-to-peace players to exploit. When America’s seen as frail, enemies of freedom emerge as strong. In a survey of 1,000 U.S. likely voters conducted between May 13 and May 16, Rasmussen found 54% believed “the chance of a major war in the Middle East is now more likely than it was a year ago.” The difference between May 13-through-May 16 and a year ago? White House administrations. President Trump called out North Korea’s Dear Leader as “short and fat”; Trump’s administration went after and killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander; Trump’s White House, citing American security, American interests, America First policy, pulled U.S. funding from the terrorist-supporting U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) - as well as the China-fawning World Health Organization. Trump named Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Trump’s State Department ushered in the peace-dealing Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The Team Trump message to the world? Don’t mess with America. And unlike the previous Barack Obama days, there were few threats and vows and promises to hang ISIS black flags from the White House - at least not so frequent. Now we’re back to Obama times. Now we’re back to weakness in the White House leading to ignited hotspots around the world.

This hobbles the dynamic private sector and perpetuates the underperforming state sector. It also leads to unsound loan portfolios for banks and to slower economic growth. Mr. Xi’s CCP wants less capitalism and more communism. This will keep the CCP in power for now but will not bring prosperity to the Chinese people. Communist economies have always underperformed capitalist ones. The comparison is most convincing when the same people work under both systems. In 2019, GDP per capita was 19x greater in South Korea than in North Korea. And compared to the PRC’s, it was 2.5x greater in Taiwan and 5x greater in Hong Kong. GDP growth is driven by growth in productivity and in the workforce. Mr. Xi’s choice of communism over capitalism is depressing productivity just as China is starting to feel the effects of a massive shrinkage in the workforce. Between 2011 and 2050, China’s working-age population will decrease from 925 million to 700 million. A comparable demographic crisis stalled Japan’s economic boom in the 1990s. The CCP will be unable to offer its people rapid economic growth and increased prosperity as in the past. This will cause unrest. With neither economic growth nor stability to offer, the CCP will resort to nationalism. It will blame China’s troubles on foreigners who want to keep China down. And it will manufacture international conflicts to rally the Chinese people around the flag. The United States and the Free World will need to be resolute in the face of sharper future challenges from Communist China. Global peace will only be preserved if China calculates that it would not prevail in a conflict against a united Free World.

Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party is reversing key reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era. This will result in less economic growth and more popular discontent. To distract from its problems, the PRC will become more aggressive abroad and nationalistic at home. The U.S. and the Free World will need to be firm in discouraging Chinese foreign aggression. Deng’s reforms introduced elements of capitalism in the Chinese economy: They allowed private ownership and created a level-playing-field between state-owned enterprises and private companies. They also brought elements of democracy to the CCP: After decades of Mao’s cult of personality, they mandated term-limits and collective leadership. Deng’s reforms led to decades of exceptional economic growth. But they also reduced the importance of the CCP. China’s private companies have always outperformed its SOEs. Many wondered why China needed SOEs. Or the CCP. Mr. Xi decided that the CCP’s control over Chinese society must be salvaged at any cost and started rolling back Deng’s reforms. Mr. Xi did away with collective leadership of the CCP and assumed total control. He instituted his cult of personality and became practically ruler for life. It is now dangerous to criticize Mr. Xi, the CCP or the government. The CCP has complete control over SOEs and favors them over private companies. PRC’s banks are state-owned and they give SOEs preferential access to lending. In 2014, the year after Mr. Xi took power, banks lent SOEs two times more than to private companies. By 2016, the last year with comparable data, it was eight times more. Favorable lending to SOEs continues today.

Beijing, over recent years, has quietly grown into an 800-pound gorilla within the United Nations system. Chinese nationals run many of the most important international organizations where they act not as global civil servants but as Beijing’s apparatchiks. At other bodies, the World Health Organization for example, those in charge, though not from China, take instructions from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). And because the PRC won election to the U.N. Human Rights Council last October, China could assert that most of the world doesn’t regard Beijing’s record on human rights as problematic. For decades, Western foreign policy elites convinced themselves that if we helped China become prosperous, its rulers would become moderate. Since that’s not how things worked out, policy adjustments are required. Perhaps, too, Mr. Blinken now sees the extent to which the U.N., its affiliated organizations and the international order in general are being transformed into Beijing’s assets, with Americans paying the lion’s share of the bills. To prevent the U.S. position from deteriorating further, will require a strategy. In the contest for global leadership, China’s rulers enjoy a distinct advantage: They’re hungry for power. By contrast, many Americans, on both the left and the right, have grown tired of shouldering the burdens that attach to being No. 1. They’d like someone else to take a turn. At present, unfortunately, there’s only one viable candidate. It’s often said that the Cold War ended with the defeat of Communism. In truth, it ended only with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Future generations of Americans will be ill-served if we leave them a world in which the CCP is the international hegemon making rules for a new and distinctly unfree world order.

All the U.S. does is issue tepid statements. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “While we urge de-escalation on all sides, we also recognize Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself, to defend its people and its territory.” This is meaningless if policies don’t follow. The Taliban is in the process of retaking Afghanistan as U.S. troops withdraw. It clearly sees this sign as an invitation to return to the days of mandatory burqas for women, denying females jobs, education and other freedoms they have recently enjoyed. A re-established base for al Qaeda may soon follow. Another sign taken seriously by enemies of Israel and the West is the Biden administration’s determination to re-enter nuclear talks with Iran, a country whose religious and political leaders have refused to stop their enrichment of uranium and have not been deterred in their determination to eradicate Israel. Bargains with the devil do not end well. See Dr. Faust and the Munich Agreement for examples. Trump administration policies were working in the Middle East (with the exception of unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan). A strong Israel and peace with at least some of its neighbors is the best deterrent against Islamic terrorism. The Biden administration is again engaging in wishful thinking and the belief that American morality can be transposed on others who do not share it. Such a process has proven folly wherever it has been tried. One might think lessons would have been learned by now. It doesn’t help that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been unable to form a government and is on trial for alleged corruption, or that the possibility of a Labor Party government could try to appease Israel’s enemies.

Signs have been a part of Middle East lore dating back to biblical times. People in the region take them seriously, which is why the signs emanating from the Biden administration are having serious ramifications. Recent rioting on the Temple Mount and rocket attacks on Jerusalem and other civilian areas from Hamas bases in Gaza signal that statements and actions (and inactions) by the Biden administration are creating a political vacuum that terrorists and dictators are eager to fill. The Trump administration had supported Israel over those who wished to destroy the Jewish state. Now, President Biden is returning to the policies of President Obama’s administration, which clearly placed Israel low on its priority list, encouraging its enemies. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, the sign is clear: Progress made by the Trump administration in forging peace deals with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan is now off the table. This administration will try to deal with dictators and terrorists who have no intention of living up to any promise they might make. Why should they amidst signs of weakness and pressure on Israel from Washington? U.S.-born Israeli writer Caroline Glick says the region recognizes that “the U.S. has changed sides, the Saudis no longer believe that with Israel they can contain Iran. So now they are hoping to cut a deal with the ayatollahs.” Since Democrats gained control of the presidency and Congress, the Middle East has been returning to previous behavior. Mullahs have ramped up their heated sermons against Israel. Anti-Semitism is also rising in Europe.

Bodo Hechelhammer, the historical investigations director for the German Federal Intelligence Service, said, “the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served their own objectives.” Castro also utilized far-right extrajudicial methods, such as “pre-criminal social dangerousness,” which enables the state to sentence civilians to prison before criminal activity has actually occurred. Franconian Spain used the charge of “social dangerousness,” and Nazi Germany used the “tactic” of preventative arrest. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by the end of 1939 more than 12,000 German prisoners were interned in concentration camps under the Nazi legal doctrine of “preventative arrest,” without judicial review. Last month, Cuban Prisoner Defenders reported about 11,000 civilians are currently jailed for “pre-criminal” charges. The result of the Castros’ decades-long misguided, dehumanizing morality and system of extrajudicial punishment is a Cuban society that lives in fear with its citizens never knowing if even mere inaction will result in imprisonment or violence. This misguided morality is safeguarded by a system that has infiltrated all levels of society from the Cuban Communist Party elite to its street level neighborhood committees and elders who cling to the failed Revolution along with their children who endure indoctrination. As such, fear will continue to rule the island regardless of whether Cuba’s “president” or Communist Party secretary general is a Castro or anyone else, and will only change when its cruel “revolutionary” framework is completely destroyed.

To achieve this goal, Castro created thousands of island-wide “neighborhood committes” (Committees in Defense of the Revolution) to report on “counter-revolutionary” activity, purportedly to protect the Revolution, just as Hitler used his “Sturmabteilung” Brownshirts to supposedly “protect” party members. But in reality, “neighborhood committees” are no different than what Nazi Brownshirts really were - state-sponsored gangs that psychologically torment civilians through harassment, intimidation, vandalism and violence. In Cuba, these acts are encouraged by police in government-sanctioned “Acts of Repudiation,” a Castro ritual in which regime supporters intimidate and threaten the victim’s family in the form of a home invasion without police interference. The regime also lines up schoolchildren to ridicule democracy activists at their homes, similar to how Hitler youth were used to disrupt church groups. The Castros spent decades morally justifying this cruelty by dehumanizing dissidents as politically impure “worms” just as the 1940 Nazi propaganda film, “The Eternal Jew,” associated Jews as unclean, racially impure rats. But these similarities should surprise no one since, in his university days, Castro was seen by student leaders conspicuously carrying Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In fact, the title of Fidel Castro’s infamous 1953 trial speech, “History Will Absolve Me,” mimicked Hitler’s 1924 trial closing argument, that he would be acquitted by the “eternal court of history.” In 2012, declassified German intelligence files revealed Castro personally approved a plan to recruit ex-Nazi SS officers to train Cuban ones.

Many mainstream media outlets reported Raul Castro’s recent resignation at the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba as a sign the totalitarian regime was taking a decisive step toward reform. This was possible only because many Americans are unaware that Cuba has spent decades engaging in tactics inspired by far-right fascist regimes, and this methodology is deeply ingrained in its political culture and system. I learned this after nearly four years of working as a White House appointed official for the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting in Miami, where I closely observed Cuba’s legal system and the Kafkaesque methods it uses to suppress and torment its citizens. I grew up in South Florida not far from the Cuban exile community in Miami. I associated the Castro regime with an effort to build socialism on the principles of the 1959 revolution. But in reality, Castro built his new “revolutionary society” with the same tactics of fear, harassment and intimidation Nazi Party leaders used in the 1920s and early 1930s during their rise to power in Germany. Like the Nazi Party, the Castros promoted an Orwellian-style morality that institutionalized and sanctioned criminal behavior against devalued citizens. While fascists like Franco and Mussolini targeted enemies of the state, and Hitler rallied his followers against non-Aryans, Castro used these tactics to justify persecution against enemies of the so-called Revolution. Just as the Nazis recruited members under the banner of anti-Semitism, the Castros created a new wave of followers to help them identify, target and persecute “counter-revolutionaries.”

As mentioned, much good effort has been made in the naval domain where U.S. and Indian navies have operated together from Hawaii waters to the Arabian Sea, but there is another domain where the U.S. and India can take the relationship from an informal security dialogue toward an “alliance.” That area is with the two nation’s armies. In June 2020, PLA forces brutally murdered 20 Indian soldiers in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh near the disputed Line of Actual Control border with the PRC. This event has had a dramatic impact on India like no other event since the 1962 Sino-Indian war. Not only were the Indian people shocked by the blatant brutality of the PLA murdering their soldiers, who were from all parts of India, but it has had a transformational impact on the Indian government. Not only did the Indian government not back down from the border by reinforcing their positions, they also took swift action to ban close to 60 Chinese applications, including TikTok (that number later rose to close to 200) and it has placed restrictions on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by Beijing. These actions, along with increased emphasis on the Quad clearly demonstrate that Delhi is seeking greater cooperation and collaboration in defense against the aggression from the PRC. In order to help demonstrate America’s commitment, the current administration should be developing a plan to create a routine U.S. Army (and the U.S. Marine Corps) training and exercise program with their Indian counterparts. The Indian army would greatly benefit from combined training with U.S. Army and other Quad member ground forces, and Mr. Austin’s experience in command of U.S. Central Command would certainly add a sense of credibility to such a program.