Austin Mlambo

CHINA’S LEADER XI JINPING TOLD DONALD TRUMP the truth about Jimmy Lai on Thursday—and the US President immediately backed off on calls for him to be freed. Here’s what happened. Trump raised the topic and Xi “went through a whole thing”, the US leader said afterwards. The facts the Chinese leader gave him were so powerful that the discussion moved on to other topics. . THE DETAILS So what did he say? ‘He went through a whole thing.’ No press was allowed into that discussion, but the present writer has seen some of the China documentation on the Jimmy Lai trial and it is accurate, detailed and evidence-based—unlike the reports in the western mainstream media. No western media attended the Jimmy Lai trial, and all wrongly presented it as a press freedom issue. Not true. It was fundamentally a foreign collusion case with more than 2000 pieces of evidence, none of which were quoted in the international press. . SO MUCH TO SAY There’s so many facts the Chinese leader could have included. Such as the fact that Jimmy Lai was shown to be in communication with multiple anti-China people in Washington, including Mike Pompeo (director of the CIA and later Secretary of State); James Cunningham, a US diplomat who ran a notorious China demonization operation; defense official Paul Wolfowitz; and others in the White House and in the US State Department, including John Bolton, the mustache man who just likes to bomb everyone in sight. The Chinese leader may also have told him that since at least 2014, Jimmy Lai had secretly distributed huge amounts of overseas cash to anti-China agents cultivated in Hong Kong by the Washington-based NED, an operation that Trump’s own administration describes as one which “destabilizes sovereign governments”. And there’s much more, too. Whatever Xi Jinping said to Donald Trump, it was enough for the US leader to realize that this man could not be released—and they moved on to other topics. For the people of Hong Kong, who are STILL unfairly suffering from the sanctions that Jimmy Lai worked with Mike Pompeo and others to introduce, justice will continue to be done.

The sooner we recognize this hard truth—that there’s no military solution to the conflict with Iran—the better off the United States will be. Sheer military force cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz without escalating the war and sucking us into another endless, bloody quagmire that delivers zero benefit to our people. We can’t get rid of the emboldened government in Tehran, regardless of how many leaders we kill. If we try we will end up with a government or failed state, worse than what we have now. The inevitable reality is this: we will have to cut a deal with Iran. We can be pragmatic and do it now on our own terms, or we can keep listening to the same neocons and the Israeli government who got us into this mess, only to cut the same deal after we’ve lost even more. Recognizing that we have hit the point of diminishing returns and pulling out now is not weakness. It is strength—and it’s the right thing to do for the American people.