Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019
US President Donald Trump gives a speech. Source: Picryl
William R. Hawkins
International Economics and National Security Consultant
Tariff Benefits Will Exceed Costs When National Goals Are Met
Paratrooper: Following in my Father’s Footsteps
Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2019
CPL Richard Hansen – 12th Special Forces Group (Airborne) collects his parachute after jumping from a C-130 in May 1987. The author, Heath Hansen when four years old, holds his father’s reserve parachute.
Heath Hansen
U.S. Army
I looked up into the big, blue sky. Far in the distance, I spotted a C-130 Hercules headed towards the open grass field I waited upon. For a few moments, I watched as the plane continued in my direction; suddenly, from the tail-end of the aircraft, paratroopers jumped out into the open air. The parachutes expanded sideways as they became caught in the wind and fully inflated, pulling the soldiers swiftly with them. Dozens of troops poured out of the fuselage and descended to the ground. I saw the first jumper hit the grass and quickly sprinted to him.
“Dad?” I asked. “No kid, your dad is still coming down; we put a white band on his helmet so you could recognize him.” Looking up, he extended his arm and pointed to a spot about 200 feet in the air at a fast descending grunt with white sports tape lining the outside of his helmet. “There he is.”
A Chaotic Start: Foreign Affairs in the New U.S. Congress
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Nechirvan Barzani, outgoing Prime Minister of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), in the province’s capital Arbil during a Middle East tour on January 9, 2019. The eight-day tour comes weeks after the US President announced that the United States would quickly pull its 2,000 soldiers out of Syria, declaring that IS — also known as ISIS — had been defeated. Source: US Department of State via Flickr.
Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2019
William R. Hawkins
International Economics and National Security Consultant
China’s Heavy 5G Hand in the Classroom: Combining its Social Credit Score with the latest IT by 2020
Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2019
Young students at their desks all with mobilephones. The mobilephone has become seen as a ‘must have’, an item of necessity among the Chinese people and China as the world’s largest country is now recognised to have the most mobilephone users. Source: Pexels.
Victor Mair, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania
I recently had a good, long talk with a young American who is teaching at a major Chinese university on behalf of a top American university.
He kept saying that life in China now is becoming more and more “intense” (he repeated that word many times). The politicization of life is felt in countless ways.
He said that the Communist Party Secretary of his school marched into his classroom one day without announcing it ahead of time and without even saying anything to him when she barged in. She started inspecting everything he’d written on the blackboards and that the students had written in their notebooks. She had her camera out and was taking pictures the whole while.
Taiwan and the Lesson of Chiang Kai-shek: Hard Cuts Soft
Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2019
Taiwan president-elect Ma Ying-jeou makes a speech, 2011. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Arthur Waldron, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania
Taiwan is never to be taken for granted. We really have to get one thing straight, which is that without Chiang Kai-shek (CKS), his mainlander army, and even aspects of his dictatorship, the free Taiwan that we love today simply would not exist. Its natural leaders, both from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Kuomintang (KMT), would either be long dead or in prison, while its young people, now among the best educated in the world, would be memorizing idiocies from the imperial thoughts of Xi Jinping.