Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, November 29

Religion and Geopolitics this week includes:

• The Tao of the Traditional Family
• Is War on the Muslim Brotherhood a Policy of the US?
• The Russian Army's Secret Weapon
• F-35 Clean Sweep
• China, the US, and Strategic Planning

Early in his pontificate the Pope said Catholics must not be trapped into "obsessing about homosexuality, contraception and abortion," He said there are more fundamental truths that must be emphasized and these "issues" would fall in place in some larger, more understandable context. The Conference of worldwide religious leaders on the Complementarity of Male and Female held in Rome from November 17th-19th was a beautiful and bracing illustration of the Pope's approach. The series of interesting and different speakers is supplemented by a link to the stunning video presentation produced by organizers of the conference. This cosmological and anthropological approach to masculinity and femininity is exactly the widening of the playing field needed for Catholic thinkers to enter all these debates on our own terms. The talks are excellent - from the Pope to Rabbi Sacks to N.T. Wright to Peter Kreeft and Fr Barron. The approach is the most fundamental lesson. The narrowing issue approach has given way to the Church explaining the larger reality from which our position on issues is derived.

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia see the Muslim Brotherhood as grave threats, not because of any extremism within the Brotherhood, but because it is a threat to their current political system. As the United States helps fight the Islamic State, it is important we weigh our relationships with Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and not allow ourselves to be drawn into the fear of the royal autocracies for democratic Muslim movements.

Advances in military technology often have broader geopolitical impact. The Russians, for example, completed a project the US has been unable to accomplish in updating its armored vehicles. The Armata program has given the Russian military a new platform from which to build battle tanks and armored infantry carriers. New focus has been placed on crew protection and better protection for arctic conditions - signs that Russia is investing in its tank crews and in protecting strategic resources in the far north. While Russia is looking at advancing its ground forces, the United States has advanced its air and sea power through the successful testing of the new F-35 at sea. The F-35, modified for use by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, is a "fifth generation" aircraft that will help maintain air and sea dominance in the decades ahead. It is also a large part of America's "Asian pivot" to counter rising China. Given this, along with vocal US strategists speaking on war with China, China may be less inclined to cooperate with the United States regarding military matters and is indeed making strategic plans of its own. The outcome is not as certain as this writer would put it. However  it seems like  a deeper Russian-Chinese partnership is more and more likely.

Map on Monday: German Invasions of France

Between 1870 and 1940, Germans invaded France three times. Although these three clashes took place in modern times, feuding between the two nations may be traced back to the division of Charlemagne's empire at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. In the division, a strip of territory between what would one day become France and Germany became the area in which many of the battles below were fought. Indeed, the victors of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and World War I (1914-1918) claimed lands in this very region.  

The map above (click to enlarge) depicts the Prussian (German) invasion of France by way of Alsace and Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. This war came as the third successive war in German unification (the first two were fought with Denmark to secure the German north, and with Austria-Hungary to secure the southeast). From these wars emerged the new German way of war - quick, deadly, and decisive. The rapid maneuvering of the Germans at the outset of the war with the French led quickly to the decisive Battle of Sedan on September 1, 1870. Entrapped by the Germans, the entire French army was forced to surrender along with their commander, Emperor Napoleon III (whose reign that day came to an unceremonious end). With the war's conclusion, Alsace and Lorraine changed hands to the Germans and the German wars of unification were complete.

Germany sought another rapid war with the French in 1914. The map above (click to enlarge) is a map of the Schlieffen Plan - a plan originally drafted in 1905 but largely became the basis for the German strategy in the opening offensive against the French. The plan of attack was a large sweeping action with forces from the north wheeling around to capture Paris from behind. The large forces coming through neutral Belgium, however, brought the British into the war. As the opening German campaign sputtered to a halt, British reinforcements and freshly dug trenches defeated the German plans for a quick and decisive war. With the eventual defeat of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine changed hands once more and returned to the French (who then began building the famed Maginot Line of defenses against future German aggression).

With the rise of Hitler, a German war with France loomed on the horizon once more. The German army drafted two plans of attack (see above) and chose the plan most similar to the rapid offensive of 1870. The larger, mechanized armies of the 1940's led the German war planners to bypass assaulting the Maginot Line for a bold offensive through the lightly protected Ardennes forest, making a drive for the coast while Allied troops were drawn into combat in Belgium and surrounded. The brilliant plan was executed with perfection, and the Allied forces were cut to pieces and forced to withdraw by sea from Dunkirk. Nevertheless, the Germans captured 40,000 men along with 50,000 vehicles. Paris capitulated in under six short weeks of fighting - and the Maginot Line surrendered as part of the brief war's concluding armistice and the rise of Vichy France.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, November 22

Religion and Geopolitics this week includes:

• Angola Prison: A Place of Encouragement
• Cardinal O'Malley on Priestesses
• 2014 Asia Update: What’s at Stake for America
• Merkel Concerned about Russian Influence in the Balkans
• Modi's Firm Stand at WTO
• U.S.-India Agreement on Stockpiles of Food Revives a Trade Deal
• Religion in Latin America
• The Death of Blackbeard 
• The Maturation of Christian Manhood: JFK and the Spiritual Destiny of Nations

In baseball, left-handed pitching aces are always at a premium; so too, alas, prison wardens who know how to bring desperate men into the hope of the living LORD are a rarity. This country is blessed to have such a warden in charge of our largest prison.

When Peter was confronted by the servant girl in the courtyard he stammered and stuttered when asked if he followed Christ. Cardinal Sean O'Malley seems even more tongue-tied in explaining why the male priesthood is not "immoral" to a feminist TV reporter on 60 Minutes. The best he could do was to say it can't be immoral because Christ wouldn't be immoral, but if he (Cardinal O'Malley) was starting a church, he would have women priests. This embarrassing anthropological confusion and underhanded insult to Our Lord makes the male priesthood incomprehensible not just to lady reporters, but to young seminarians and old priests bereft of a father's voice in dioceses like Boston. The reason so many young teenage males were abused in the Catholic Church is because the careerists who have advanced in the American hierarchy have no father in them. Listen here as an apostle replays Peter in the courtyard. We can only pray that he will see the face of Christ, hear his own words of betrayal, and go somewhere to weep.

An excellent overview with maps and charts of the US relations in Asia by Heritage Foundation researchers.

One way to look at the Russian Bear is through the eyes of the Germans as Germans, While many words have been spoken and much ink spilled over Putin's presence in the Baltic Sea and over the skies of the Baltic States, Vladimir Putin - Slavic and Orthodox - has his eyes in the Balkan nations of Europe's southeast. This assessment of the influence of Russia's Putin with other Balkan nations is sobering.

Nations need leaders like the body needs its head. Narenda Modi of India delayed a WTO agreement a few months ago and the pro-business nationalist was labeled a short-sighted obstructionist by the "free trade community." Modi is all for easing barriers to trade in many areas, but food security for his nation was not on the table. The WTO has tied acceptance of its multifaceted treaties with a requirement that nations not subsidize more than 10% of food production for their own populations. This magic number "destabilizes" markets. Obviously, many nations see food production as a part of the national economy ruled by other dictates than elastic pricing and free trade. Mr. Modi held out and his willingness to ease trade barriers in other areas will not depend on his surrendering his governmental duty to feed his people at home. It was a practical lesson in achieving progress in international trade without sacrificing economic nationalism.

On November 13, 2014, The Pew Research Project on Religion and Public Life released a 310-page document on 'Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region.' It is an excellent introduction to help us study and ask when the sleeping giants of the Iberian Catholic tradition will reenter the arena of world politics as Catholic nations led by Catholic statesmen.

On this day in 1718, the ruthless Blackbeard met his bloody end in a sea-fight off the Carolina coast. (The first quarter of the 18th century was the Heyday of Pirates, as they preyed upon the commercial routes between Europe and the New World. And where was their safe haven -- the locale "where they [went] to restock, sell their loot, repair their ships and recruit more men"? The British Caribbean.) See also: The Golden Age of Piracy.

President John F. Kennedy died 51 years ago today. He was America's first Catholic president and a masculine liberal who understood that men of different religious creeds were bound by their civic duties against the common threat of armed atheism. He called men to this brotherhood of protective duty in nations large and small.

Map on Monday: World War I Redraws European Boundaries

The map above depicts the European map during the years of World War I. Below is a map which looks strikingly different. It is the redrawn map of Europe following the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918.

The most significant changes between the two maps may be found in the Balkans and around the Baltic Sea. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated in war, was broken up and the many nations which were conglomerated within her were given the ability to rule themselves as governing states. In the decades ahead, however, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would themselves require more separation as the nations within them had yet to achieve statehood. In the northeast, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia appeared out of what was once a part of the Russian Empire - which itself had now fallen to militant atheists under Lenin's communist USSR. Though it had a long history of statehood, Poland re-appeared as yet another new nation on the post Great War map.

Other areas had changed to a lesser degree. Germany was now cut off from East Prussia due to a land corridor of the newly formed Poland which gave it access to the sea. Italy had shifted slightly, gaining further territory to the northeast in Tyrolia. France, victorious in war, regained the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which it had lost to the Germans following a stunning defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (indeed Germany had hoped its 1914 campaign in France would have been as successful as the one in 1870).

An often overlooked area of the map is the division of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish nation will be the first secular regime emerging from the Ottoman caliphate. Much of today's Mideast map was reconfigured from the Ottoman Empire's dismemberment. The map below demonstrates:

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, November 15

Religion and Geopolitics Review this week includes:

• What Happened to Our Souls?
• Valerie Jarrett Is The Left’s Dick Cheney
• Gorbachev warns the world ‘a new Cold War’ may have already begun
• Russia and Ukraine: A Violent Past, A Cloudy Future 
• Nigeria Struggles to Keep It Together
• The End of NATO

Mark Judge discusses what happened to our souls.

There has probably never been a president in US history so bereft of a male group of advisors as President Obama. His authority figures resemble his anthropologist white mother far more than his Kenyan black father. The queen of his internal female cadre is Valerie Jarrett. Here are a few interesting profiles.

Another speech at the Berlin Wall should be listened to as carefully as the JFK and Reagan speeches that helped tear down the wall. Mikhail Gorbachev, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, warned against a new and dangerous barrier being erected by NATO and the West against Russia. This interview is a good introduction to the thinking which underlies the animus of many prominent US Catholics to Vladimir Putin, Russia and leaders of the Orthodox Church

Nigeria has the largest population (175 million) and GDP in Africa, but it is really two nations. The Muslim north would be the fifth-largest Muslim country in the world, and the Christian south would be the 6th-largest Christian country. The girls captured by the Muslim Boko Haram were in a government school in the north. They couldn't be rescued because the Nigerian federal government based in the Christian south doesn't militarily control the rest of the nation. The oil of Nigeria is overwhelmingly in the Christian south. The other important communal divisions in the country are the many ethnic groups with three dominant groups. Nigeria exists on a cultural fault line where "earthquakes of State" are bound to happen.

The continued role of the US in NATO is one of the central strategic questions we face as a nation. A succinct review of our problem by an eminent military historian.