Hudson Scholars on the Front Line of Religious Freedom Debate

This week, President Trump hosts an event to promote the administration's ambitious global religious freedom agenda, bringing together advocates and key policy makers for the second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. 

The State Department's Report on International Religious Freedom, which was released ahead of the ministerial, cites China as the top violator of religious freedom in 2018. In a recent interview with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Nina Shea discussed China's blatant disregard for religious liberty and how it has accelerated in recent years, saying: 

I think that there was a growing boldness on the part of President Xi and his determination to get control of Christianity. At one point, Christianity was said to have more members than the Communist party, and they were viewed as a challenge to the single-party Communist state. They don’t want any ideological competition or anything independent of their control. They want to control organization, speech, and association, so they didn’t like the fact that Christianity was blossoming exponentially and largely doing so outside government control.

We’ve seen Beijing crackdown against the Falun Gong, an indigenous Chinese spiritual exercise movement. The group claimed to have had about 30 million followers. They were completely crushed inside China in the 1990s. China is quite capable of using the most brutal means to crush movements it doesn’t like, whether political, religious, or cultural. 

In a recent article for Providence, Lela Gilbert examines how India's Christian population is becoming increasingly marginalized. 

On the sidelines of the ministerial, Hudson Institute's Working Group on Christians & Religious Pluralism in the Middle East, in partnership with the International Community of the Holy Sepulchre, will host a meeting on the preservation of Christian holy sites in the Middle East. Learn more about Hudson's sideline dialogue here. 

Hudson Highlights

Commentary

U.S.-Iran Escalations

Mike Doran's observations regarding Iran’s “maximum pressure” campaign are referenced in The Hill:

The objective of Iran’s threats is clear. As Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute has eloquently outlined, Iran’s indications of nuclear breakout — and its increasingly bellicose behavior in the Persian Gulf — are intended to raise the specter of war with the United States, and prod increasingly nervous European nations to pressure the U.S. to back off its campaign of “maximum” economic and political pressure.

Mike Pregent on Iran’s miscalculations in its attempts to save the JCPOA in the Jerusalem Post:

Mike Pregent is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Like Goldenberg, he thinks that the primary goal of the Islamic republic is to gain leverage.

"The US Senate, both Republicans and Democrats are asking for snap-back sanctions on Iran. I think all of this is going to backfire,” Pregent said.  “The game that they're playing is one that would have worked on the Obama administration, [but] now it's not even going to work on the Europeans, and that's how bad they are miscalculating here.

According to Pregent, the Iranians have been pushed into a corner by the Trump administration and they know it. Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump ordered an American aircraft to stand down minutes before an attack on Iranian soil, for example. Pregent thinks that through this and other moves, the Trump administration was able to deliver its message without firing a single bullet.

In an interview on The Debate—France 24, Pregent discusses whether or not Iran will make any new decisions with the regime and new threats they’ve made against the international community.

U.S.-China

Michael Pillsbury comments on how new Commerce Department licensing regulations will impact companies like Huawei in the Washington Examiner:

“This is quite a brilliant idea, that he can adjust, the Commerce Department can adjust which licenses they give,” Michael Pillsbury, the Hudson Institute’s director for Chinese strategy and author of an influential book warning of China’s geopolitical ambitions, said Monday. “The licenses could be granted quite quickly ... but they can also be turned off again.”

In an interview on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, Tom Duesterberg discusses the impact of the China trade talks on domestic market:

The current state of play is that [the U.S. and China] are going back to the table. We don’t know when they’re going back to the table, but they have committed to that. China’s given a few concessions in terms of buying more agricultural products and they see it as a concession going back to the table. The U.S. on its side relented a little bit on the Huawei sanctions and deferred from imposing new tariffs. 

The next steps are talking. And the president has said that this may take a while and I’m afraid it will because there isn’t a strong incentive yet for the Chinese to make further concessions which would have to be to get a good deal, to have serious structural reforms on the way they treat intellectual property [and] the way they subsidize their industry.

My view is that the existing tariffs on China as well as the technology limitations that have been put into place are going to have to take a while to have an impact on the Chinese economy. We can already see that the Chinese economy is weakening. The manufacturing reports released yesterday show that the Chinese manufacturing sector is actually contracting. So slowing down the economy of China will put some pressure on the leaders there to take the trade negotiations more seriously.
 

Robert Spalding on ties between China and U.S. pension programs in the Epoch Times:

“Somebody coming from China who clearly had [a] close relationship with [the] Communist Party would clearly [be] helping investment into China. This of course will bring risk to CalPERS [California Public Employees Retirement System], because we are in the middle of rebalancing our economy away from China,” said Robert Spalding, former senior director at the White House National Security Council and senior fellow at Washington-based think tank the Hudson Institute.

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