Monthly Archives: July 2024

But They are the Same Theater

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A letter writer in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section expressed his concern for NATO’s increasing emphasis on the People’s Republic of China threat in the Pacific, saying in part,

NATO, however, shouldn’t be pushing into Asia or treating Europe and Asia as the same theater.

And

…founding charter: to maintain the peace in the North Atlantic and defend its member states from a Russian attack.

Asia, the Pacific theater, dominated as it is by the enemy nation, the People’s Republic of China, and the European theater that’s formally the DOC of NATO are, in fact the same theater; the two regions are adjacent Areas of Responsibility.

This isn’t a matter of who’s got the intercontinental reach of missiles. It’s the closely intertwined—and dependency creating—trade regimes and economies, as the PRC exports at artificially lowered price its goods into Europe; the PRC engages in active cyber espionage and cyber sabotage activities; the PRC engages in active dis- and misinformation, pushing as it does its state-owned and -run social media facilities like TikTok and ecommerce facilities like TEMU, one of which actively pushes false claims (not information) and both of which actively hoover up individualized personal and business information for the use of the PRC’s intelligence community; the PRC’s PLA moves into the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic Oceans and into the northeastern Mediterranean Sea with its dual use commercial and military seaports and airports; and on and on.

Maintaining the peace in the North Atlantic, thus, requires the PRC threat to that theater be addressed. Furthermore, the PRC’s nakedly open support of Russia in the latter’s equally naked invasion of a sovereign nation makes it imperative that “defending…from a Russian attack” involve addressing the PRC threat. That’s optimally done at the source; hence the need to emphasize the threat to NATO interests and security by including Asia as one of the AORs in the NATO theater of operations.

Distance in the modern world is nonexistent. It’s entirely appropriate that NATO expand its area of regard and learn to do two things at once.

Rethinking

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Holman Jenkins wrote Tuesday about Rethinking Trump and the Ukraine War. His central thesis is the “confusion” in Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s intelligence community and throughout his administration generally about what to do about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how to respond—if at all—to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprisingly amateurish attempt to sow further confusion in our domestic politics (and the even more amateurish emphasis on those efforts by Biden’s…advisors…throughout his administration).

But my concern arises prior to any of that; it centers on the underlying misconception of the nature of that war.

That rethinking that Jenkins wants to see needs to begin with a correction to that misconception, and I’m almost as concerned that Jenkins and nearly everyone else who should know better…don’t.

Russia invaded with the purpose of erasing Ukraine the sovereign nation and reducing it to a petty satrap in Vladimir Putin’s empire, and Ukraine is fighting for its existence.

It isn’t the Ukraine war; it’s the Russian war, inflicted on Ukraine. Only with an accurate understanding of that situation can any ideas of what to do about it be developed.

Dictating the Terms of Business

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is at it again, trying to dictate how private businesses in our, so far, substantially free market economy will be permitted to operate. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden intends to dictate to landlords:

Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: if you raise rents more than 5%, you should lose valuable tax breaks.

This isn’t just the big landlords, either, bad as that would be by itself. Biden’s proposed cap would apply to half the rental market in the country.

We’ve known this for a while. Here’s then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeting:

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.

He’s talked about fundamentally transforming our economy in his State of the Union addresses, also.

Why Should She Go?

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The knee jerk “boss must go” cry whenever someone in the organization that boss leads screws up is…silly. See for instance, the hue and cry that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle must resign or be fired over the security failure that allowed an assassin wannabe to take his shots at former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, narrowly missing killing him.

It’s not even known how the lapse occurred, but let’s go ahead and get rid of the lady in charge.

Sometimes, such failures are the boss’ fault. Sometimes the failure can be laid off to the organizational culture the boss fostered, or the lackadaisical attitude toward training or equipage, or to an emphasis on DEI claptrap at the expense of effective performance.

Often, though—more often, I claim—it’s a matter of one or more of the following:

  • bad luck (luck gets a vote right alongside the opposition)
  • sound procedure poorly, or mistakenly, executed
  • sound training, but an individual(s) executed his training poorly
  • sound Standardization/Evaluation procedures, but an individual(s) fell through the cracks
  • poor training procedures and/or poor Stan/Eval procedures, in which case the supervisors of those sections and those supervisors’ immediate supervisors need to be looked at
  • poor operational oversight of individuals in the course of their performance—look at those supervisors and their immediate superiors
  • poor communication with external agencies involved in the action—what caused that (who caused that should come second in that part of the post mortem)

It’s an even more extensive list than that.

So: do the investigation, here of the Trump assassination attempt, of the protection procedures, and of the execution associated, thoroughly. Then decide what corrective action to take, and take it.

Blame, fire, investigate is a suboptimal order of events.

There’s a Separate Problem

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The People’s Republic of China’s debt-fueled economic growth is threatening to hinder continued growth, even to cause serious contraction for the PRC’s economy. Much of that debt is local government off-the-books lending and, especially,

The deterioration of China’s real-estate market in the past three years meant local governments could no longer rely on land sales to real-estate developers, a significant source of revenue.

There’s another problem with that last, though, that makes off-the-books debt issuance even dicier for those local jurisdictions. The local governments own, or owned, only a finite amount of land, and so there is an upper bound to the amount they can sell to those developers. It’s very much akin to feudal Europe, where parents, over a very few generations would subdivide their land to give some to their eldest sons to use and profit from—and then ran out of land to subdivide. It was worse for the kings, who gave away royal lands to eldest sons and to nobles as rewards or loyalty purchases. The kings ran out of land, also.

Kings and local PRC governments could repossess those lands on one or another pretext, but such moves were, and are for the PRC governments, fraught with political danger. In the PRC’s case, the land limits, as much as any market for real estate, meant that borrowing against that collateral becomes even more risky, as the land collateral becomes smaller, along with the constructed buildings becoming expensive to hold on inventory pending sales that aren’t happening.