Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. While a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he worked with the military Manpower Task Force. He is also the author of several books, including Human Resources and Defense Manpower (National Defense University).
Posts by Doug Bandow
March 29, 2022
Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues. Ukrainian resistance so far has been fierce, but Russian forces retain a huge advantage in firepower. A victory by Moscow would mean installation of a puppet government in Kyiv, with harsh repression to follow.
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March 07, 2022
The group Open Doors USA figures that 360 million Christians last year lived in countries where persecution was “significant.” Roughly 5,600 Christians were murdered, more than 6,000 were detained or imprisoned, and another 4,000-plus were kidnapped.
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February 11, 2022
A year ago Burma’s military staged a coup. The junta has since killed at least 1,500 people and detained another 12,000, of whom nearly 9,000 remain in custody. A couple thousand sought by the regime are in hiding.
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January 18, 2022
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is completing the destruction of the old Hong Kong. The last vestiges of free expression and democratic choice are disappearing.
On January 4, the media site
Citizen News closed due to the deteriorating legal environment.
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January 05, 2022
Communism has spawned only one full-scale monarchy: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. On December 17, 2011, 70-year-old Dear Leader Kim Jong-il died. That very same day, Kim’s 27-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, was put forth as the “Great Successor” and surrounded by elderly “mentors” who were supposed to guide him as he took over the leadership.
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December 14, 2021
Presidential summits tend to focus on PR rather than substance. The Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” looks no different.
Its objectives were worthy. As the State Department explained it, President Joe Biden planned to “bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”
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November 30, 2021
China’s Xi Jinping has already served longer than any U.S. president other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Xi is likely to pass FDR in just a couple years. The Chinese president and Chinese Communist Party general secretary has secured the support necessary for a third term—expected to be followed by a fourth and even fifth one, should Xi, currently 68, live long enough.
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November 08, 2021
The collapse of the Soviet Union 74 years after the Bolshevik revolution was supposed to herald the end of communism. Yet the People’s Republic of China lives on, 72 years after Mao Zedong famously proclaimed the founding of the PRC in Beijing.
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November 01, 2021
Hong Kong has become the face of China’s dictatorship, the most dramatic evidence of Xi Jinping’s determination to extinguish even the hint of dissent among his people. Today residents of the Special Administrative Region are ruled as completely and cruelly by the Chinese Communist Party as are those living in Beijing or Shanghai.
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