Cuba called on Washington to provide equal access to health care during the coronavirus pandemic. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Venezuela chimed in as well. Even North Korea felt emboldened to “express grave concern over violations committed by the United States at home and abroad in breach of international human rights law.” America’s allies sprung to our defense, right? Quite the contrary. Move on to the World Health Organization whose inquiry into the origins of the pandemic is to be led by Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand. U.N. Watch, an independent organization, has documented her close ties with Beijing and her praise of the WHO’s response to the spread of the fearsome pathogen ― a response that, by any objective measure, was neither competent nor honest. U.N. Watch also has pointed out that Ms. Clark has a close professional relationship with James Chau, a WHO “Goodwill Ambassador.” In June, Mr. Chau was the subject of a complaint filed by 100 non-governmental organizations alleging he “systematically abused his U.N. position to whitewash Beijing’s role in the virus outbreak.” In a related effort to ingratiate itself with Beijing, the WHO named Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, as another Goodwill Ambassador. UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has designated her as a “special envoy” as well. Recently, the WHO’s annual assembly spent hours beating up on Israel for such imaginary misdeeds as violating the health rights of Syrians. Israel has long been the U.N.’s favorite whipping boy. Recently, the U.N. unmistakably escalated from anti-Israelism to anti-Semitism, denying Jewish history.

With the defeat of the Axis Power in 1945, the United States emerged as the strongest military, economic and cultural power on earth. Rather than emulate hegemons of the past, American leaders envisioned a new and different world order. Their goal was to organize an “international community,” establish “universal human rights” and a growing body of “international law.” This project required new institutions, in particular the United Nations. President Truman predicted that the U.N. would become “the means of preserving the international peace and of creating conditions of mutual trust and economic and social well-being among all peoples of the world.” Though the U.N. never lived up to such high expectations, for years one could credibly argue that it did more good than harm and might improve over time. Today, it requires willful blindness to deny that the U.N. and most other international organizations have become bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, increasingly serving the interests and expressing the values of the world’s despots. Over recent days, evidence supporting this conclusion has been especially abundant. Start with the U.N. Human Rights Council, the “main intergovernmental body for human rights in the U.N. system.” It is dominated by egregious human rights violators who, within this forum, are rarely criticized and often praised. One example: The concentration camps where China’s rulers have incarcerated several million Muslim Uighurs were recently lauded as “vocational skills education and training institutions.” Summoning extraordinary chutzpah, UNHRC members China and Russia recently demanded that America root out racism and police violence.

Socialism, in all its variants (democratic socialism, communism, Nazism, etc.), is all about taking property from one person and giving it to another, all in the name of equality. The historic and modern-day socialists live in a fairy-tale world where they think people will produce as much at a 90 percent tax rate as they will at a 20 percent tax rate, and where all government programs are administered with great competence, efficiency, and honesty. This never happens. Many socialists, once having obtained power, even if by democratic means, claim the right to never allow a reversal. Sen. Bernie Sanders, and the other socialists advocate “free” healthcare for everyone, “free” higher education, and much other “free” stuff. But they are unable to explain how this is to be paid for. Some mumble about higher taxes on the rich - but again they are so unobservant and unthinking that they fail to notice the flight of rich people from high-tax states to low-tax states, and from high-tax countries to low-tax countries. The mainstream media is quick to pounce on Mr. Trump for any of his contradictory and silly statements, but many of them give a free pass to the socialists whose statements are often more absurd and dangerous than anything the president has said. If more members of the media had studied the physical sciences, economics and history, they might be better at thinking beyond stage 1, or the first order effect of a policy. Can you think of one socialist experiment that worked in the last several hundred years? They were all failures. Children and young people are attracted to socialism because it seems to promise “fairness” and security - but, in fact, this attraction is product of an unobservant, unthinking and immature minds.

They do, however, care about their bottom line. So, depending on the mood of the day, so too blows their marketing and branding strategies. If, like in the case of HBO Max and “Gone With the Wind,” complaints are raised about a corporation’s “product offering,” the movie can be removed. This increasingly means what the public is “allowed” to see by these corporations, is what they get. If a classic American film is deemed to have fallen afoul of the current zeitgeist, then bye-bye. And since the zeitgeist is always in flux, sooner or later, your favorite films will be quietly cancelled. You may miss them, of course, but your kids won’t - they won’t even know these films existed. This is happening with books, too. As schools provide each pupil with an iPad in the hopes of enhancing preparation for the 21st century, hard books are no longer as needed. After all, the library can just be downloaded. But this makes it extremely easy to pull books from general access. What will the children do, go to a bookstore? A library? Soon depictions of those places will only exist in museums. (Sorry, digital museums.) We must remind ourselves that the feel-good easy access of today is not promised, and indeed already shows signs of curtailment. We must remind ourselves not to trust in the goodness of corporations (or the government). Finally, we must remind ourselves that it’s time to move proactively to protect the good, the bad and the ugly of American arts and letters for posterity. This is our history, it must remain accessible for all to see.

The phone in your palm has the potential to hold more books than filled the vaunted Library of Alexandria. Your movie subscription service grants you access to more films than you have hours in your life to watch. Put another way, thanks to digital technology, we are living in an unprecedented time with respect to access of American (indeed, global) arts and letters. But our seemingly unfettered ability to get what we want, when we want, prevents us from understanding the lurking threats from our new digital masters. Because as it turns out, censorship is now committed at once more easily and more swiftly than ever before in history. And as our reliance on the medium increases - behold the number of universities and grade schools moving to all-online classes - so do our vulnerabilities. So, paradoxically, in an epoch where everything is at our fingertips, we will soon “forget” the good things worth retrieving. The first thing to understand about digital censorship is its subtlety. The Internet is like a vast stream, flowing with the strength of the Ganges. Complex algorithms determine the results of your searches. Tweak the algorithm just a little, and you can divert the stream. In countries like China, the Internet has many of these dikes and dams. Some tech-savvy people can get around the censors; most cannot. In the United States we don’t worry as much about government censorship these days. Corporate censorship, however, is another story. It is a routine job. Nike does not really care about improving race relations, nor does Citibank.

Today, however, America possesses the means and the immediate need for this system. It also possesses a Space Force capable of leading the development of such an important defensive system. Thankfully, North Korea is not nearly as significant of a nuclear weapons state as the old U.S.S.R. was - meaning that even a rudimentary space-based missile defense system could likely deter North Korea from nuclear brinkmanship. Besides, it took a mere seven years and a paltry $28 billion (in today’s dollars) for the United States to develop the first rudimentary nuclear weapons under the Manhattan Project. It would not be that hard for the Space Force to achieve a similar result with space-based missile defense today. North Korea cannot be trusted to act responsibly with nuclear weapons under any circumstance. Nothing and no one can change the fundamentals of the U.S.-North Korea relationship. The Kim regime’s legitimacy rests, in large part, on its commitment to reuniting the Korean peninsula under its rule. That will not change - especially with nuclear weapons being available to Pyongyang. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to be China’s cat’s-paw against the West - thereby rendering moot any meaningful diplomacy with America. In fact, North Korean nukes will likely compel the Kim regime to attempt to forcibly reunite the Korean peninsula in an emotional outburst, sooner rather than later. The only way out of this quandary, then, is for Washington to push through a reliable space-based weapons defense system before Pyongyang starts launching its nukes at us or our allies. Without space-based missile defense, the United States will be attacked with nuclear weapons.

Each time the United States engages with North Korea in anything other than saber-rattling, Pyongyang uses that reprieve to enhance its nuclear weapons arsenal. Other foreign policy experts believe that if North Korea cannot be trusted with nukes (it can’t), and if there can’t be a constructive diplomacy between North Korea and the rest of the world, then American military force - another Korean War - is the only answer. These analysts are wrong, too. With the creation of the U.S. Space Force, America finally has the infrastructure necessary to surge development of space-based missile defense. The U.S. military doesn’t have to invade North Korea to remove its nuclear threat. Deploying a reliable space-based missile defense system would render whatever advantages Mr. Kim believes he possesses with his newfangled nuclear weapons arsenal obsolete. The goal of creating this new space-based defense system would be simply to defend the United States and its allies from the North Korean nuclear threat - without ever placing U.S. troops in harm’s way. Mr. Trump(America) should immediately take to the airwaves (and Twitter) and call for a new Manhattan Project, this time for space-based missile defense. Former President Reagan attempted a similar endeavor during the Cold War with his Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”). He was ridiculed and stymied from within the bureaucracy. To be fair, also, it is likely the technology was not yet mature enough to yield the kind of results that were needed to defend the United States against the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

Blubbering before a national audience, North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un apologized to his people for not being able to raise their living standards. He then effusively thanked the loyalists in his party for having the “patriotic spirit” to stand with him and his regime as the military rolled out its new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Thus, the moment many Korea watchers have long feared has arrived: North Korea possesses a nuclear capability that can threaten the United States. There is no going back. The existence of North Korea’s ICBM and Mr. Kim’s emotional outburst should unsettle audiences everywhere. That kind of destructive power tethered to an unstable ruler is a bad recipe. Instead, some Western scholars are oddly heartened by North Korea’s nuclear development. After all, denuclearization was a barrier to better U.S.-North Korean relations. These scholars believe that by abandoning denuclearization, more constructive, stable diplomacy can be created between the United States and North Korea. In 2017, President Trump reached the same conclusion, when he ostensibly abandoned the American demand for North Korean denuclearization in order to start a meaningful dialog with Mr. Kim. This is a dangerous assumption, though. Now that Pyongyang definitely possesses ICBMs capable of hitting the United States, no American can rest easy. For the Kim regime is not your typical government. It is, in the unforgettable formulation of Luke Harding, a “mafia state.” Such a state might be bribed into submission for a time. But a mafia state’s lust for blind power and bottomless greed make it impossible to create a stable diplomatic dynamic.

A new wall divides our world: China’s Great Firewall. This Great Firewall isn’t one system, but encompasses all of the various technical means of censorship that China’s Communist Party (CCP) uses to suppress the free flow of information. For the CCP to survive, it must control not only the information coming into China, but more crucially, must limit the voices inside from being heard by the Free World … and it’s done precisely that. The effect has been disastrous. As the CCP has accelerated its human rights atrocities ― harvesting organs, building concentration camps in East Turkistan (“Xinjiang”), erasing the language and culture of countless peoples, arresting the faithful, forcing LGBT people to submit to electroshock “therapy,” concealing a Chernobyl-level coronavirus pandemic from the outside world ― the stifled screams of the CCP’s victims have barely been heard. If we’re earnest in our desire to confront this new Evil Empire then these victims are the voices to whom we must lend volume. Manhattan Project-sized Allied effort is needed ― complete with wartime funding and specific tasking for the cyber components of our national powers ― to slay the CCP Dragon. We must hand the microphone to those who have suffered, and to those who can tell those stories on their behalf. In the absence of such efforts, those on the frontlines staring down this Dragon are valiantly fighting to fill the void. This isn’t the only example of activists filling the void where the Free World’s failed. As we contend with the Chinese regime and its human rights atrocities, which are only now barely being exposed, we must redefine the zeitgeist. The CCP’s Maoist cadres are the true counter-revolutionaries, for the revolution is freedom.

It is difficult to imagine now, but at the time of PNTR passage, there was uniform sentiment among the political class that inviting China into the community of nations would eventually produce changes inside of China, undermine the power of the Chinese Communist Party, and reduce its indifference toward killing its own citizens. Mr. Clinton promised “this is a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences.” Later, Republican President George W. Bush noted while extending the deal that: “We trade with China because trade is good policy for our economy, because trade is good policy for democracy, and because trade is good policy for our national security.” They were both, of course, tragically wrong. By any measure - market access, national security, human rights - all the last 20 years have done is strengthen the Chinese Communist Party and weaken the United States. There are estimates that in those 20 years, five million U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost. The job losses that resulted from shifting American manufacturing to China unraveled local economies. In places such as Youngstown, Ohio, when factories closed, so did restaurants, and then stores. Then crime increased, and eventually the residents left. Small, formerly prosperous cities became ghost towns. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders - who are the de facto leaders of their parties - have made it clear that normalization was a mistake. Companies, especially those with supply chains that run through China, need to recognize that our approach for the last 20 years has failed, and they need to act accordingly. On this anniversary, we need to commit to correcting the mistake.