A time to run
The Jewish people have a couple of thousand years of built-up expertise on when to run. Those of us without a keen sense for when to get out tended to end up dead. The recent history of my own family brings this into sharp relief.
Based on that intergenerational expertise, I’d like to share some advice with three groups of people:
Americans and Westerners in China
A number of parents with children in China have been asking me about the situation with China and Taiwan.
Here’s my advice: Get your children out right now.
Picture in your mind how you will feel when your son or daughter is picked up by the local police and interned, as the CCP girds for war in the Taiwan Straits. You won’t be able to communicate with them. You won’t know if they’re alive or dead. And they’ll be held as a hostage, potentially for years, while the conflict plays itself out. They may never be released.
You probably don’t think this is going to happen. But it’s very plausible. It’s a serious possibility that really could happen. You should plan for this possibility. Even if you think it’s a 1 percent chance, you should get your kids out now.
For a long time, my advice to Americans and other Westerners has been to avoid going to China. And my advice to the parents of Fulbright and Schwartzman scholars, and others studying in China, is to persuade their children to get out as quickly as possible.
If things escalate significantly in the Taiwan Strait, I fully expect that every Westerner in China will be interned and held as hostages. This kind of escalation is eminently plausible at this point.
China has seen how unbelievably effective Hamas’ strategy of holding hostages has been in bending Israeli public opinion and ensuring Hamas’ survival. And interning foreign citizens in war has a long, long history, going back at least to the Napoleonic wars.
Fact: Today, there are more Americans detained in China than anywhere else in the world.
To the Alawites
Ahmed Al Sharaa, the terrorist in a tie, is successfully consolidating power and gaining foreign recognition in Syria. He and his followers are going to wipe you out. They’re going to exact vengeance for the years of Assad rule.
In a few years there will be no Alawites left in Syria. It’s time to run.
The Russians will not, and probably cannot, protect you. They’re tied up elsewhere.
There isn’t a good alternative patron for an Alawite microstate: The United States doesn’t want the bases and the trouble that would come with them. Maybe the Greeks are a candidate - they certainly are no friends to Sharaa and HTS, or to the Turks who are backing them. But I doubt that they have the capacity or the desire to protect a coastal Alawite microstate.
To the Druze in Syria
I fully expect that Al Sharaa and HTS will do their utmost to wipe you out. He’s not a former terrorist or a former jihaadist, despite the idiocy and gullibility of the Western press.
You’re in better shape than the Alawites: The Druze in Israel will insist that you be protected, to the extent that doing so is feasible and not outrageously costly. And a geographically compact Druze microstate against the Israeli border is a useful thing for Israeli security in the long run. Even better if it were a buffer state covering the entire Israeli border with Syria, or at least the important approaches, but it’s not clear to me whether the ethnic geography and physical geography on the ground supports such an outcome.
Israel has no interest in occupying territory down out of the hills toward the outskirts of Damascus, out into the flatlands where maneuver warfare is an option. It’s time for all the Druze in Syria to relocate into the hill country along the Israeli border.
There appears to be a Druze community in the south along the Jordanian border. It seems unlikely to me, just looking at a map, that this group will be in a position to defend themselves: I can imagine that they might be resupplied by the Israelis through Jordan, but such an outcome seems unlikely and brittle to me.
If the Syrian Druze are to survive, my suggestion is that they all relocate into a compact, defensible, ethnic microstate in the mountains on the east side of the Herman range that is contiguously connected to Israel. Anyone who is not there is likely to be wiped out as HTS consolidates power.
Form a compact microstate next to Israel, and declare independence, while you still can. Or flee elsewhere.