Opinion/Foreign Relations
Ken Timmerman’s Threat Watch, www.kentimmerman.com 10-24-25
| The China watchers were all wrong. Some had predicted that President Xi would be ousted from power at this week’s Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party, based on the recent purge of Xi’s top ally on the Central Military Commission, the Party organ that controls the People’s Liberation Army, the PLA. Instead, Xi emerged victorious from the four-day meeting on Thursday, with a Party spokesperson saying that the major theme of the Plenum — and of the upcoming Five Year Plan– will be the fight against corruption. By the way, Xi’s ally, who goes by the name He (as opposed to Xi, which is pronounced She), was just one of 22 generals on the Central Committee who failed to show at the big powwow this week. The other 21 also appear to have been purged because of corruption. In Xi’s China, corruption is often a byword for incompetence. The PLA is notorious for operating enormous Mega factories to feed US export markets with everything from bicycles to ninja turtles and Christmas lights. With President Trump’s new punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, many of those factories are shutting down, creating massive unemployment. And that is a social time bomb not just for Xi but for the communists in general. But you won’t learn that from The NY Times. I haven’t read the Grey Lady regularly for at least a decade — and I used to work for the NY Times in the late 1980’s when it was still an actual newspaper. (You can read about that in the “Damavand” chapters of my book, And the Rest Is History). But it so happened that as Christina and I were heading into the airport to fly to Budapest for the weekend, we picked up a baggage cart with — you guessed it– the front section of Friday’s NY Times. There on page one, masquerading as objective analysis, were two anti-Trump screeds. The first claimed that Trump was loosing the trade war with China because President Xi had a “secret weapon,” his massive manufacturing capability. (See above). The second claimed that Trump was upsetting the post-WWII order — an order that benefited the US but also our allies — with chaos and irrational and impulsive policies. No mention at all of the real nature of the post-WWII order, which was this: the United States pledged to maintain the peace worldwide by deploying the US Navy to keep shipping lanes open and 300,000 US troops to Europe. And all of this while allowing the Europeans to flood our markets with tariff free imports, on the pretext that they were recovering from the devastation of the war. That devastation apparently continued until January 2025 when Trump returned to office and said no. You guys have now got to pay your fair share of the common defense. Oh, and if you want to help Ukraine, you can buy our weapons and send them to Kyiv. And here’s the rub: this isn’t my original interpretation of recent history but that of left-leaning geopolitical analyst Peter Zeehan. Much nonsense is also said about Trump’s so called love affair with Turkish autocrat Erdogan. He came to the Oval Office on Sept 25 desperate to get Trump to reverse his decision to block Turkeys purchase of F-35 fighters, which Trump made after Turkey welcomed in Russian military advisors to service the S-400 air defense systems they had just bought. The S-400s were designed to shoot down the F-35. Trump said, well, maybe. But shown is the troops in Gaza. Turkey like Qatar and even the UAE has said we don’t want to be the ones to disarm Hamas. But that’s what they signed up for by joining Trump’s 10-point peace plan. Now it looks like the Indonesians will be the ones to send troops into Gaza. Muslims, for sure. But not Arabs or former imperial rulers, like Turkey. This could get interesting. I discuss all this, as well as why the Trump-Putin summit in Budapest got pushed back, on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend. As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville, Florida area or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. Yours in freedom, Ken |
| Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here. Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here. – Senior Fellow, America First Policy Institute (current) – Republican nominee for Congress, Maryland District 8 (2012) – President & CEO, Foundation for Democracy in Iran, www.iran.org – Nobel Peace Prize nominee, 2006 Cell: 904-817-8584 NEW NUMBER Follow me on Twitter @kentimmerman Facebook: ken timmerman New personal email: [email protected] Website: kentimmerman.com |
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