John Metzler

For nearly a decade now, China’s “Belt and Road” commercial infrastructure initiative (BRI) has been expanding globally.

The ongoing Beijing Winter Olympics have averted our attention from a possible geopolitical clash of titans.

In a truly bizarre twist of international diplomacy which would have baffled even the denizens of Monty Python, the Islamic Republic of Iran whose UN membership dues were in arrears and thus barring the country’s General Assembly voting rights, was figuratively bailed out by an unlikely source, a hidden hand.

Russian tanks and mechanized infantry are churning dangerously close to Ukraine’s borders.

When the Taliban forces overran Afghanistan a few months ago, not only did they capture a country continuously in conflict since the initial Soviet invasion in 1979, but they equally seized huge stockpiles of American supplied weapons provided to the defeated Afghan military.

Following the Taliban’s lightning takeover of Afghanistan and America’s humiliating withdrawal, the remote South Asian country soon morphed into the political netherworld.

The setting is remote. The players are highly improbable. Yet in the deep and forgotten forests along the Belorussian/Polish frontier, thousands of migrants from far off Syria, Iraq, and even Afghanistan are massing and milling trying to enter Poland.

The ongoing global COVID pandemic combined with a shroud of secrecy and indifference has hidden the fast-deteriorating human rights situation in North Korea.

Here we go again; Another military coup in Sudan.

China’s ongoing human rights abuses against its Muslim minority in Xinjiang have again been chastised by a key UN committee. Forty-three countries strongly condemned the Beijing regime’s widespread human rights violations against the Uyghur minority in what has become a systematic state policy in China’s western Xinjiang region.

Beijing’s communists are good at bullying; look at political crackdowns in prosperous Hong Kong, the suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, and of course China’s ongoing military harassment of Taiwan, a democratically ruled island which the communists claim as part of the People’s Republic of China.

We all remember where we were on September 11, 2001. We all remember with sheer disbelief watching the unfolding horror and the realization that “it could happen here.”

Sadly, we have seen this movie before. In the Spring of 1975, the collapse of South Vietnam coming to crescendo with the fall of Saigon indelibly marking a generation.

Cuba’s ongoing political and social upheaval has shocked many observers as a sudden and intense summer storm. Across the island in small towns and provincial centers protests erupted like a squall line until reaching the capital Havana.

It’s summertime and the living is easy, as the old song goes. And vacations both domestic and international should be surging despite dark pandemic clouds still shrouding parts of the world.