November 2, 2024

Maximum Asymmetry Against ‘The Plan’

Few wars in history have had such a long leadup as China’s coming war of choice. The Chinese themselves have said it was coming for at least the last thirty years. We started taking them at their word about 20 years ago. Robert Kaplan wrote an ...

May 22, 2024

Just stop feeding the Houthis

In the Middle East the traditional way of dealing with tribes that have attacked your interests is to counterattack into their territory and wipe them out. That was in ancient times. Let’s skip forward a couple of thousand years to the First Ba...

February 13, 2023

The needle and the damage done

That was the title of a song about heroin by Neil Young 50 years ago.  It is also the grim reality facing those who took the vaccine route in the hope of averting a COVID infection. It turned out that the va...

June 30, 2022

Germany's experience with COVID 'vaccines' suggests they increase omicron infections

This would be hilarious if it were not so serious.  From this blog comes the map below of omicron BA.5 incidence in Germany. The former East Germany is outlined in green, and you will note that it has a lower infection rate than the...

March 29, 2022

Russia, China: The Torpedoes Circle Back

The situation in Ukraine is like the fate of the USS Tang, a submarine in WW2 with an exemplary record in sinking Japanese ships before she was sunk by one of her own torpedoes that had circled back on her. The tale was told by the nine survivors. ...

January 21, 2022

One reason Russia won't invade Ukraine

So many things the Democrats organized have turned out to be false flag operations (Whitmer kidnapping, January 6) that it would be safe to assume that everything they do is a false flag operation until proven otherwise.  This brings us to ...

March 13, 2021

Afghanistan's population problem

America has been involved in Afghanistan since 2001, when a punitive expedition was mounted to punish the perpetrators of the World Trade Center outrage.  The expedition had no particular aim or use-by date, so mission creep turned into a g...

December 19, 2020

Australia's naïveté on China

Now it is just dangerous.  While the world holds its breath over the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, the Chicoms are doing what thugs and bullies do.  They have banned the import of a number of Australian commodities: c...

December 18, 2020

Executive Order 13848 and the stolen election

The fate of Western Civilization, some three thousand years in the making, now hangs by a slender thread.  That thread is Executive Order 13848, signed on September 12, 2018.  The background to this is that the U.S. president can ...

October 21, 2020

Fauci's COVID-19 Folly

According to Australian researchers, the Wuhan COVID-19 virus likely is artificial, created in the lab -- in China. According to Chinese virologist Li Meng Yan, it was intentionally created and spread by the Chinese government.   Let...

August 8, 2020

China is licking its chops for a slice of Tajikistan — and a side of Japan

In 2011, Tajikistan ceded 1,000 square kilometers of territory to China in return for some debt forgiveness.  In July this year, an article in Chinese news outlets claimed that Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains historical...

June 19, 2020

China: The nature of the beast

Where are we up to in China's timetable for going to war?  Numerous anecdotal reports suggest very high up.  In Hong Kong, to take just one example, the television airwaves are saturated with calls to war.  Here is o...

June 10, 2020

Know Your Enemy: China

If you want to understand why China will attack us, the place to start is the old U.S. Department of War film, Know Your Enemy: Japan, made the last time we were attacked by a major Asian power that was transitioning from its feudal past. Th...

March 30, 2020

Even Up the Odds by Leasing Nukes to South Korea and Japan

Has the Wuhan virus nudged China toward the virtues of peaceful co-existence?  The first place to look for a sign of that is the Japanese Foreign Ministry record of intrusions into Japanese waters around the Senkaku Islands: The big jump ...

February 18, 2020

How Xi's bungling has devastated China's military capabilities

There is a lot written about China these days, and most of it is correct in describing that country as nasty, aggressive, and a threat to civilization.  President Xi wants to be emperor of the whole world and can see a path to achieving tha...

December 21, 2019

Gold Is the Harbinger of Scarcity

The Left in the developed world knows what it wants. Conservatives don’t know what they want so much as they know what they don’t like, which is whatever the Left wants. So, there is a tendency, in the absence of a coherent world view of ...

December 19, 2019

Sweden: The Wages of Self-Loathing Is Civil War

The Danes have put extra resources into controlling the country's links to Sweden because of bombs going off in Denmark due to people coming from Sweden.  The people from Sweden are Islamist criminals.  The Swedish government ...

December 3, 2019

The Moral Case for Decoupling from China

One of the first people to see that the infatuation with China would end in tears was Robert Kaplan. In 2005 he wrote an article entitled “How We Would Fight China”, though he didn’t say when or why we will be doing that fighting, o...

November 17, 2019

In trade relations, China is now effectively eating its seed corn

The CIA famously failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But in 1976, a French historian by the name of Emmanuel Todd did predict that collapse, based on his analysis of rising infant mortality rates, which bet...

October 29, 2019

China's president's daughter is at Harvard. That's a big warning sign

Taiwan News, established in 1949, recently carried an article saying President Xi's daughter, having graduated from Harvard in 2014, is now back there. And that it is likely for her own safety.  The safe space movement at Harvard peaked...

October 25, 2019

The Globalists’ Race Against Time on China

To recap briefly, most of the communist countries collapsed by 1991 and the Western democratic tradition was seen as the winner of an existential battle that had waged since the Russian Revolution of 1917.  Historian Francis Fukuyama called it ...

September 27, 2019

Advice for Our Vietnamese Friends on China

China has invaded Vietnam on and off since 111 B.C. The Vietnamese have a long and honorable history of fighting Chinese invasions, starting with the Trung Sisters in A.D. 39. The most recent Vietnamese leader to throw out his country's Chin...

September 26, 2019

Angela Merkel's Toll on Germany

The best profile of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in the English language is this one.  This is no doubt she was very sympathetic to the Soviets growing up. Her parents moved from West Germany to East Germany in 1954, soon after she w...

July 22, 2019

Xi Jinping Is a Jealous God

Early this year, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party ordered the destruction of a large Buddhist statue that had been carved into a cliff face in Hebei Province.  The 190-foot-high statue of Guanyin, the goddess of compassi...

June 25, 2019

China's Rogue Regime

It is commonly accepted now that China is using its trade with the United States and other OECD countries to increase the size of its economy, which in turn will allow it to build its military to the point where it can attack the United States and ot...

June 5, 2019

Agriculture's role in China's War

The planting season for corn is just about closed.  As of June 2, this is what the crop looked like for the eight largest corn-producing states with production for the 2016 crop year: Those eight states account for 74% of U.S. corn p...

May 28, 2019

Freezing in July?

Following on from this post on the effect of excess water in the Midwest affecting planting, this graphic shows rainfall in the 30 days up to 26 May: Figure 1: Rainfall in the Midwest in the 30 days to 26 May. One place had almost a...

May 23, 2019

Climate and the fate of corn

It is a remarkable thing that the U.K. and Irish parliaments were able to hypnotize themselves and pass climate emergency legislation when the southern half of the planet has not warmed at all in 120 years.  For example, this record of Cape...

April 23, 2019

The Economist jumps on the global warming hysteria bandwagon

It used to be that ocean acidification was the last refuge of the global warming scoundrel. When all else fails — lack of actual warming, etc. — the global warmers claim that increased carbon dioxide will make the seas acid and dissolve t...

March 21, 2019

Ten Years after Climategate, the Global Warming Fraud Is on Life Support

The global warming hysteria was reaching a crescendo in the lead up to the climate confab in Copenhagen in 2009 when a civic-minded person released the Climategate emails, deflating the whole thing. Those emails, concocted from the fevered imaginatio...

March 17, 2019

Rick Perry has surrendered

Rick Perry, Secretary for Energy, gave a speech last week in Houston. As reported by the Financial Times, this was the gist of that speech: Rick Perry, the Trump administration’s energy secretary, several times at the conference referred t...

March 7, 2019

Dr. Happer will set them free

It was easy enough to predict that Trump would appoint Dr. William Happer to set up a Presidential Committee on Climate Science. Two years have passed and have been lost.  The first years of the Trump administration were hobbled by poor ...

January 31, 2019

Occasional Cortex: Therefore Japan Goes Nuclear

Russia’s annexation of Crimea had its origin in Victoria Nuland and her ilk in the State Department. Nuland brought regime change to Ukraine and Putin’s reaction was in effect that if there were to be no rules, he would do what he wanted ...

January 29, 2019

Signs that China is feeling the pressure

The big news from China is that there were no Chinese incursions into Japanese waters around the Senkaku Islands in December: You can tell from that chart when President Xi was promoted to running China.  It was the sudden rush of Ch...

January 5, 2019

Shanahan and China

To quote Shakespeare's Henry V, "The courses of his youth promised it not."  The then-deputy secretary of defense Patrick Shanahan gave a speech at an Air Force Association conference on September 19 last y...

December 21, 2018

Mattis was no good

American Thinker readers were warned about General Mattis over a year ago in this article.  Briefly, Mattis was and remains a supporter of global warming. The issue of global warming continues to be a reliable and simple litmus test....

November 28, 2018

Angela Merkel's 'EU army' explained

The notion proposed by France's President Macron that Europe should have its own army, and by that he meant the E.U., was promptly supported by the German chancellor.  The proposal has met with incredulity and derision.  The more approp...

November 20, 2018

China: There Is A Way

The 2018 report of the Department of Defense to Congress on China’s military read like a shopping list – a useful compendium of weapons systems.  But reading it gives no insight on when the Chicoms will attack. The more recent 539 pa...

June 18, 2018

China's Next War

Despite being two of the world’s three remaining communist states, China and Vietnam look to be on the verge of war. Vietnam is an obstacle to China’s ambitions for East Asian hegemony. One of truisms from popular culture is that one s...

June 8, 2018

China and the Clash of Civilizations

To recap briefly, after the collapse of most communist states in 1990, the world appeared to have entered a period of permanent peace.  Stanford University-based political scientist Francis Fukuyama called it "the end of history,"...

May 23, 2018

T Minus Two Years for a War with China

First of all, how do we know that the war with China is definitely on the agenda?  We tend to rationalize other countries' behavior because it is hard to accept, in this day and age, that a country would go to war just for the sake of i...

May 3, 2018

Someone Send the Coal People the Memo

To put this story into context, let's go back to 1899 and the publication of Johann von Bloch's book Die Zukunft des Krieges (The Future of War).  Bloch was a 19th-century railway magnate who had built the Warsaw to Moscow rail...

February 16, 2018

The similarities between Islam and China

The end of the Cold War was expected to bring eternal peace; the peace dividend was squandered on expanding the welfare state.  In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Samuel Huntington warned of Isl...

February 13, 2018

China's Further Vulnerabilities

China is facing increasing economic headwinds over the next decade as its coal production tops out and then goes into steep decline.  That will increase the cost of doing everything in China, and the country will become a less for...

January 20, 2018

Zimbabwe abuses Americans saving it from mass starvation

One reason for reading the output of left-wing entities is that many are well funded and thus have the ability to cover subjects that the media don't have the resources to inquire into.  Thus, you get to read about plenty of development...

January 4, 2018

Here is what's holding back China's plans for world domination

There is no doubt that China wants to subjugate Asia, echoing Japan's role during World War II.  For those who think China's economy might overtake the United States economy, and thus make China a more formidable adversary, this article ...

December 30, 2017

Ukraine needs to be more like Poland

There was a saying in the Soviet Union: "If you are not stealing from the government, you are stealing from your own family."  That was the problem with a lack of morality.  The government responded by having guards on everything....

December 29, 2017

For the umpteenth time, China will not overtake the US economically

Anybody who was reading newspapers in the 1980s might remember the dire predictions of those times that Japan's economy would continue to grow faster than the United States' and overtake it in the very near future, now past.  The superio...

December 27, 2017

Rich Higgins: Not Wacko Now

Rich Higgins, a Trump loyalist, was director for strategic planning in the National Security Council up to July 21, when he was fired by H.R. McMaster for writing a memo that detailed the threat to President Trump from the Deep State. ...

December 26, 2017

Iraq: Time to let go

Consider the data in the following table of Iraq's recent wars and its population at the time: A couple of things are apparent.  One is that Iraq has a lot of wars, mostly of its own choosing.  Second is that Iraq's wars, in ...

November 29, 2017

Correct Thinking on China

The United States has been trading with China since 1784, the year a U.S.-flagged ship set out from New York for Canton. American missionaries were preaching in China by the 1830s. For some 80 years now, the United States has gone out of its way to h...

October 18, 2017

China's War Timing Firming Up

Part of Obama’s baleful legacy is that during the Scarborough Shoal Incident of April to June 2012, the Filipino president travelled to Washington to ask Obama for U.S. support. Obama didn’t offer support, no operational support followed ...

September 11, 2017

China Makes It Easy

Steve Bannon is right.  China is the main event, North Korea is a sideshow. Nevertheless, one of the poorest nations on the planet has decided that its heart’s desire is to have a weapon system that can land one or more nuclear weapons on ...

September 4, 2017

Mattis attempts to normalize a severe mental disorder

The two collisions involving destroyers from the 7th Fleet were entirely predictable, in a statistical sense.  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has been warning for years that the Navy's attempt to cut costs by under-manning its sh...

September 1, 2017

Mattis Is No Good

And neither is Rex Tillerson. But let’s consider Mattis first. James Mattis has made a couple of moves which can only be explained by his being quite ill-intentioned. Firstly, in written testimony to his Senate confirmation hearings Mattis stat...

August 31, 2017

China's 19th Party Congress

The next presidential election will be on 3 November 2020.  We can all plan around that if we want to. China also has a president who runs that country.  The next Chinese Communist Party confab to choose future leaders will be the 19th P...

August 2, 2017

The Curious Case of Rainer Baake

Are you worried about the Russian influence on the presidential election? If so, there's a chance you are at least eight years too late. Consider the curious case of Rainer Baake, born in 1955 in the West German town of Witten. From his German Wi...

July 20, 2017

The Nazi Origins of Renewable Energy (and Global Warming)

Why study history, and such an ugly subject as the Nazi rise in the Weimar Republic?  Because, quoting George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  It seems we have forgotten a lot, because, as a civiliz...

July 17, 2017

Who are the GOP warmists?

They are the worshipers of a lesser god, global warming.  Foreign Policy, the propaganda arm of the Brookings Institution, reports that a number of Republican congressmen helped defeat an amendment to the 2018 defense funding bill proposed by Sc...

June 24, 2017

Afghanistan: Just walk away

Our involvement in Afghanistan is untenable because the country is untenable.  No matter what is done, Afghanistan will fail because of its galloping population growth. When the U.S. became involved in 2001, the country had a population of 20...

June 16, 2017

China Is Ticking All the Boxes on Its Path to War

There are currently three communiques that have guided U.S.-China relations for the last 45 years. These joint statements by the U.S. and Chinese governments were signed in 1972, 1979, and 1982. Among other things, the second communique states that, ...

June 16, 2017

The F-35: Even the engine is compromised

  The measure of the efficiency of a jet engine is its thrust-specific fuel consumption, or TSFC for short.  This is its fuel consumption per unit of thrust and for U.S. jet engines is measured in pounds per hour per pound of thrust. ...

June 1, 2017

Civil wars all around

Venezuela's coming civil war has been a long time coming, and it is still coming.  The rot set in early after President Chávez was elected in 1999, as shown by Venezuela's cattle statistics. Chávez's agricultural ref...

March 27, 2017

Heather Wilson, swamp creature

Donald Trump started the year without a nominee for the position of secretary of the Air Force.  On January 13, the president-elect met the CEO of Lockheed Martin, Marillyn Hewson, at his Florida residence.  On January 23, the White House a...

January 8, 2017

Bernie Sanders, Swamp Creature

One of the puzzling things about the Obama administration is that, despite his leftwing rhetoric, President Obama did not attempt to reform the military-industrial complex.  It could be said that President Eisenhower, in naming the military-indu...

January 6, 2017

It's past time to kill the F-35

Stairway Press in Las Vegas has just published a book about a problem called the F-35. The F-35 is so bad that there is no point in proceeding with it.  Even if it worked as per the original specifications of the development contract in 2001,...

January 17, 2016

5 Reasons Why Our F-35s Are Too Dangerous to Fly

The F-35 has been around as long as global warming.  The aircraft had its origin in the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program started by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy in 1993.  The word "Strike" in the designation of ...

June 2, 2015

China: What the Matchup Looks Like

Some pundits have noted that the U.S.-led effort against ISIS has not been effective, with ISIS being able to continue to take territory.  This has led to some angst about how effective our systems are against these fanatical irregular troops....

May 17, 2015

Genes, Mutations, and Behavior

While human progress came from natural selection working on beneficial mutations, there are more deleterious mutations than beneficial mutations. Evolution is also the sifting out of harmful mutations that occur in every generation.  Human ev...

May 12, 2015

The Council On Foreign Relations Falls Out Of Love With China

The Council on Foreign Relations is a left-leaning entity.  As such, it has looked at China through rose-tinted glasses.  As recently as November 2014, it praised China’s complicity in helping President Obama hobble U.S. industry with...

April 30, 2015

Seven Reasons China Will Start a War By 2017

China will start its war for a number of reasons: Regime Legitimacy Very few people in China believe in communism anymore, including almost all of the 80 million members of the Chinese Communist Party.  The party itself is now a club ...

April 27, 2015

A Century Later: Not the Guns of August, But Perhaps September

The world could stumble into war, as it did 100 years ago.  Whoever hired the snipers of Maidan Square have a lot to answer for, including making China’s planned war in Asia more difficult for the US and its allies.  As a quid pro ...

March 21, 2015

The Disappointment That Is the F-35

First of all, be aware that strange things happen in the U.S. military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.  Take the example of the M1 Abrams tank.  The U.S. Army has an inventory of 6,300-odd of these tanks, inclu...

March 15, 2015

A Strategic Plan For The West

Entities without a plan tend to drift; they tend to get overtaken by events instead of shaping events in their favor.  The United States shouldn’t be drifting because it has a plan.  The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 requires a Nation...

March 12, 2015

Why China Will Lose the War It is Planning

How do we know the war is coming in the first place?  Because the advertising for it is out.  Amongst plenty of other evidence, one Chinese front organisation conducted a poll on Australian attitudes to the ANZUS treaty and a Chinese attack...

February 22, 2015

Studies In Comparative Theology: Hidden Imam Versus Hidden Heat

Two of the faiths trying to take over the world believe in hidden things. Of the two, Islam is the more venerable with its sacred texts over a thousand years old. Global warming’s faithful are still writing their sacred texts with adaptation to...

February 20, 2015

Let's Not Feed Our Enemies

A current article on Strategy Page has some useful statistics.  There are now four million Syrian refugees outside Syria and those people cost over $8 billion per annum to be kept alive.  That works out at about $2,000 per capita or $5.50 p...

January 29, 2015

More evidence China preparing to attack Japan

While America is preoccupied with the Middle East, evidence accumulates that China is actively preparing for the launch of a war with Japan.  Just over a week after I wrote this article on evidence of China’s preparations for an attack, Ja...

January 28, 2015

As China Plans for War, the US Renames its Battle Plan

The Pentagon has relabelled its battle plan for fighting China in the Western Pacific.  The battle plan formerly known as AirSea Battle is from now on to be known as “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons.”...

January 13, 2015

China Prepares for War

Apart from their frantic dredging and island-building in the South China Sea, China is now also building an air and naval base in the Nanji Islands (27° 27’ N, 121° 04’ E) which is the closest part of China to the Senkaku Islands....

December 6, 2014

First Job for the Zumwalt Coming Up

The pace of island-building in China’s so-called “Blue Territories” is frenetic. Janes has reported that the island at Fiery Cross Reef is now 3,000 metres long. There are five dredges going at once to dig out the harbour and p...

November 26, 2014

China: The Window Is Closing

There was an idea in the mid-19th century that trade promoted peace.  That is, once countries realised that they did better trading with one another than fighting, peace and goodwill amongst nations would prevail.  This was the theme of two peace con...

November 15, 2014

The Middle East From Here

Recent analyses of the Middle East situation have tended to concentrate on the mistakes that were made in getting involved in the region.  Past is prologue, as Shakespeare said, but it is fruitless to discuss sins of omission and commission in t...

November 11, 2014

Exploit the Breakout

Oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them.  The reason why Republicans won control over so many state legislatures was because it was one way for voters to protest against Obama and his works.  To retain what has been new...

August 7, 2014

Peak China

China has become wealthier in the last couple of decades but unfortunately is using some of that new wealth for military adventures against its neighbours.  The neighbours aren’t happy.  Over 60 percent of the people in countries bord...

July 29, 2014

Grain Importers Should Be Nice To Grain Exporters

Through most of our lives, growth in grain production outran world population growth.  That resulted in grain prices falling for decades and grain being fed to animals for meat production.  World per capita meat consumption more than double...

July 29, 2014

Gaza as the EU's Second Front

As Glenn Reynolds has reminded us, the EU has been the major funder of the Palestinians in Gaza and is well aware that 250 million Euros-odd a year of their funding goes to buying weapons for attacking Israel.  Eleven years ago, European Union P...

July 27, 2014

Gaza and the End Game

Gaza has 1.8 million residents and a population growth rate of 2.9%.  The population doubling time is 25 years and at that rate Gaza’s population will be 3.6 million in 2039.  Most of Gaza’s GDP is from foreign aid and most of t...

July 9, 2014

The First Circle

There are a lot of interesting and useful statistics on various U.S. Government websites and one of the most interesting sets of statistics is made available by the USDA. It is of GDP for most of the countries of the world going back to 1969. The USD...

July 4, 2014

Starvation and the Middle East

A lot of the folktales we were told as children involved starving peasant children begging for scraps of bread.  That is what happened in Europe during the creation of our folk memory.  People spent a lot of their lives on an involuntary ca...

June 27, 2014

Photovoltaic Energy Is Not Renewable Energy

Photovoltaic (PV) power is created from a burst of coal-sourced energy priced at 4 cents/kWh, which you get back as an intermittent and declining dribble over the following 20 years at 15 cents/kWh.  The numbers vary with location, but the basic...

June 26, 2014

Reversal of Fortune: The Fate of Oil

  We noted in this article that a Shell Oil geologist by the name of King Hubbert in 1956 correctly predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970, which it duly did.  It has been said that this is the most successful economic predi...

June 19, 2014

A Cold Dawn Coming

There was a time in climate science when tree rings were used for good instead of evil, a time of innocent enquiry, a time that ended with the noble-cause corruption. From that time, one of the best predictions of climate ever made (weighted for...

May 26, 2014

Two Charts and Their Portent

Last week brought news that the Energy Information Agency (EIA) has reduced its estimate of recoverable oil from the Monterey Shale in California from 13.7 billion barrels to 600 million barrels. To put that in perspective, the U.S. consumes 6.9...

May 22, 2014

Israel Will Be The Last Man Standing in the Middle East

The Arab Spring, which started with the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable vendor at 11.30 am on 16th December, 2010, has resulted in two failed states in the region so far.  Libya has become “Scumbag Woodstock” because of the n...

May 19, 2014

China's 'Mobile National Territory'

China has built an offshore oil drilling rig, numbered HD-981, specifically for the purpose invalidating other nations’ claims to seabed they thought was theirs.  There is no doubt about the purpose of the rig given that a Chinese state oi...

May 1, 2014

China Picks at the Scab to Keep the Wound Fresh

Why would China want to disturb the peace of the world?  The roots of the coming conflict go back to early last century. The notion of China’s humiliation at the hands of foreigners is almost one hundred years old.  It was first po...

April 23, 2014

As China and Japan Prepare for War, American Forces Battle over Turf

Many readers of American Thinker may be thinking that a war between China and Japan, with or without the US being involved, is precluded by the fact that it would be stupid and destructive.  Nevertheless, the people who are actually going to fig...

April 20, 2014

Say Goodbye to Egypt

In 2011, the clerical intellects in Egypt proposed that the pyramids be destroyed because they were idolatrous reminders of Egypt’s pre-Islamic past.  Egypt’s real problem is more prosaic -- the mismatch between an agricultural syste...

April 12, 2014

The Twilight of Abundance

Baby boomers enjoyed the most benign period in human history.  The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace.  We had cheap energy from an inherent over-supply of oil.  Grain supply increased faster than populat...

April 2, 2014

Afghan Twilight

Afghanistan is a country with violence at Palaeolithic levels, a misogynist religion, and endemic corruption.  It is surrounded by countries that are hostile to it and the West.  In fact, it seems to be made up of territory that is unwanted...