The timing of China’s entry as a global power at the UN Copenhagen conference on climate change was remarkable.
The simple yet powerful message Chinese premier Wen Jiabao delivered was Beijing will nix any international agreement harmful to China’s national interest.
China, together with India, Brazil and South Africa, put to rest the scam of man-made global warming. In doing this, they tore away another layer of U.S. President Obama’s narcissistic preening that he was in Copenhagen to single-handedly save the planet from overheating.
In this new decade, China will increasingly be a major story in how it conducts its relationship with the rest of the world, particularly the U.S., and how it handles the growing volatility of its population, restless for improved human rights and freedom.
The emergence of China as a global power coincides with the discontent of Americans over the state of their republic.
A generation and more of rising innumeracy and falling literacy – which, among others, the late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago discussed presciently in his now classic book The Closing of the American Mind – has brought the U.S. to the unenviable situation where its future is befogged by economic uncertainty and pushed by political cynics into preposterous debt that nobody knows how to pay for.
The big political story, therefore, for 2010 will be to what extent the remorse of an increasing number of Americans over how they voted in 2008 will be registered at their mid-term November election.
Europe is a troubled continent. Its shrinking relevance in world affairs will be countered by its feeble efforts to cling to whatever glamour of past decadence it can still offer to the newly rich from other continents.
Africa remains a continent stuck in hopelessness; its best and brightest suffocated to death by the shallow banditry of the likes of Robert Mugabe.
The Arab-Muslim societies will continue to be a sore headache for the rest of the world.
There is no compelling evidence from anywhere in the Arab-Muslim world that Muslims are prepared to strike the hard bargain necessary to reverse their slide into history’s black hole and begin the long steep climb to reconcile themselves with the modern world.
This decade will test – more likely bring to an end – the west’s enduring tolerance or patience with the bottomless politics of Muslim resentment and endless provocations of terror.
The struggle for freedom wherever tyranny prevails, as in Iran or Tibet, demands support. Yet, sadly, the requisite support will not be forthcoming as the west contends with its own diminishing sense of what it means to be free and noble. But the one relatively bright story is about Canada, despite the rancour in the mainstream media. Rarely, as the saying goes, is greatness recognized at home.
This past year was Stephen Harper’s political education and the hustlers gathered in Copenhagen put him to the test. When other leaders of the former G7 were losing their heads, Harper kept his cool, displaying the steel within him to steer Canada wisely past demagogues, despots and thugs who fill the halls of the UN.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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