Paratrooper: Following in my Father’s Footsteps

Posted on February 16, 2019 by admin

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2019

The photograph depicts a soldier packing away his parachute in a field. A young boy in a red jersey is seen in the foreground holding an army bag.

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.”

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A Chaotic Start: Foreign Affairs in the New U.S. Congress

Posted on February 6, 2019 by admin

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is photographed seated on the left and Nechirvan Barzani seated to the right. A gold coffee table is located between them. Another table with a flower arrangement appears in the foreground.

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

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China’s Heavy 5G Hand in the Classroom: Combining its Social Credit Score with the latest IT by 2020

Posted on February 3, 2019 by admin

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.

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Taiwan and the Lesson of Chiang Kai-shek: Hard Cuts Soft

Posted on January 22, 2019 by admin

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2019

Ma Ying-jeou is photographed next to a podium. He is smiling, holding his glasses in his hands.

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.

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THE BATTLE FOR WEST PAPUA

Posted on January 18, 2019 by admin

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2019

Ben Bohane

Photojournalist

Supporters carry West Papuan leader Benny Wenda through Port Vila, Vanuatu. The supporters are holding flags and a man in a red shirt appears is sitting on a plank of wood held up by the crowd.

Reports of the Indonesian military using white phosphorous munitions on West Papuan civilians in December are only the latest horror in a decades-old jungle war forgotten by the world. But new geopolitical maneuvering may soon change the balance of power here, prompting regional concern about an intensifying battle for this rich remote province of Indonesia. It is time for the US and Australia to change policy, complementing Pacific island diplomacy, or risk a major strategic setback at the crossroads of Asia and the Pacific.

Once again, Papuan highlanders have fled their villages into the bush where they are starving and being hunted by Indonesian security forces.

Fighting between OPM (Free Papua Movement) guerrillas and the Indonesian military has increased in recent months creating a fresh humanitarian crisis in a region cut off from the world: Indonesia prevents all foreign media and NGOs from operating here. This makes West Papua perhaps the only territory besides North Korea that is so inaccessible to the international community.

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