Category Archives: defense policy

Occupying Gaza

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Israel has developed a plan to do this as a necessary step to finally destroying Hamas. Israel had done that some decades ago, but it was an incomplete occupation, and so it ultimately was a failure. One of the reasons for the failure  was that Israel intended only on controlling Gaza with no intent to destroy Hamas, hence it was an incomplete occupation.

The current plan has that as the goal and purpose of the planned occupation. I think the plan could work and not even be very long-term, if a couple of additional factors are included (and I have no idea whether they are or are not).

The IDF would need to completely isolate Gaza along its borders and seacoast to keep the terrorists from escaping out the sides and back. If they can do that, then occupying successively seized territory, whether contiguously seized or in separate chunks as the tactics and real-time situation require, then the Israel wouldn’t need to maintain the occupation of all of Gaza for any longer than it would take to satisfy themselves that all the arms and supply caches have been seized, the tunnels plugged, and Hamas functionally exterminated rather than leaked away.

The other factor is the formation of an Abraham Accord collection of Arab states plus Egypt that would emplace a governance function in Gaza. At that point, Israel could withdraw from the strip.

A New US International Trade Regime

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As thought of by me.

The beauty of it, if I do write so myself, it that it’s wholly independent of tariffs, whether foreign policy or protectionist.

The idea, at a level of generality, is this. Congress, the President, and his Cabinet Secretaries develop a list of all goods and services critical to our national defense. The list must necessarily include dual use goods and services, those items that can serve both the private economy and our defense systems.

Then Congress and the President draw a hard line and require that 15% (to pull a number from the æther) of everything needed for production of those critical goods and services, from ore through intermediate components to the last components needed for final assembly or service provision, be produced entirely domestically. This would serve two purposes. One is that it would relieve our dependence on other nations, particularly enemy nations, for any of those goods or services, the denial of any one of which would stop our economy and our ability to defend ourselves beyond stocks already in place—a few weeks to a couple of months worth in an active shooting conflict.

The other purpose is that it would give us an extant production core from which we could surge production and expand production facilities much more quickly than if we had to attempt to start from scratch just to begin to surge.

The last step is to require a review of the list of goods and services every five years, de novo, adding to/removing from the list as necessary to keep it current. Every five years to relieve the review cycle, at least a little bit, from political cycles while keeping the update rapid enough to keep up with evolving technologies.

Of course, this will cost more than a classical Ricardian free trade, Smithian free market environment, but that’s the cost of national security. If we can’t protect a capacity for self defense, we’ll pay a far higher price.

There should be No Question

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SecState Marco Rubio thinks Iran could have peaceful, energy-producing nuclear reactors so long as Iran uses only imported uranium already enriched for the purpose. Iran insists on doing its own enrichment.

There should be no discussion of this.

For Iran, not having its own enrichment capability is a deal breaker. For us, Iran having that capability should be a deal breaker. Iran has shown itself wholly untrustworthy with its enrichment program, rapidly enriching already to 60%, despite the fact that the 2015 accord expressly limited Iran to 3.7%-ish, and that accord remains in effect. Our withdrawal from it is irrelevant; all the other signatories, including Iran, remain nominally within its confines. Iran, despite its obligations under that accord, continues to deny inspectors access to facilities those inspectors want to see, and it demands untenable advance notice for those few facilities to which it has allowed access.

For all that, apparently unaddressed is what to do about the plutonium that lots of peaceful energy-producing uranium-fueled nuclear reactors produce. Plutonium can be recycled through peaceful energy-producing plutonium-fueled nuclear reactors, but critically, plutonium also can be used separately in nuclear bombs.

It’s rapidly approaching time for a kinetic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.

A Useful Self-Identification

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The People’s Republic of China has decided not to apply its across-the-board 125% tariffs on certain goods that it imports from the US.

China’s government has exempted some US imports that the country would struggle to immediately source from elsewhere from its retaliatory tariffs, people familiar with the matter said.
Chinese authorities have told some importers of American goods that they would waive the most recent 125% increases in tariff rates for certain US imports. Those products include certain semiconductors and chipmaking equipment, medical products, and aviation parts, the people said.

These, then, are precisely the goods that we should cut off from exporting to the PRC.

On the other hand,

The Trump administration, similarly, announced exemptions on its “reciprocal tariffs” for China-made smartphones, laptops, and other electronics earlier this month, a recognition of the US’s reliance on China for such goods.

This is a mistake if the purpose is anything other than a negotiating tactic. There is a critical difference between the two sets of goods. The goods the PRC is exempting are critical components and component-making goods whose cutoff would severely impact that nation’s ability to make downstream products. The goods the Trump administration is exempting are finished products. Their supply chains can be adjusted to flow from non-PRC sources, including domestic, an adjustment that might be difficult, but an adjustment that both is eminently possible and is absolutely necessary: we should never have ourselves dependent on an enemy nation for such goods.

What Cold War?

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The press continues to pretend obliviousness to what’s been going on between the People’s Republic of China and the United States for many years. The headline and second sentence of a recent Wall Street Journal article lays out the sham ignorance quite clearly.

Breakdown in US-China Relations Raises Specter of New Cold War
…
Today, with economic relations between the two careening off the rails, China and the US are headed toward what could be a Cold War….

The fact is the PRC has been inflicting a cold war on us for 15 or more years, and we’re only just starting to respond to it. For instance,

• The PRC has coerced intellectual property and proprietary technology transfers to PRC businesses and companies as a condition of doing business with them or within the PRC
• The PRC has coerced partnering with PRC-domiciled companies as condition of doing business inside the PRC to facilitate those transfers
• The PRC has demanded placement of party apparatchiks into company management
• The PRC has demanded backdoors be installed into company operating software to allow PRC officials—those apparatchiks or others—to monitor company behavior and to copy data of interest
• outright theft of intellectual property and proprietary technology
• cyber espionage, data theft, sabotage of data, entry into cyber, energy, water network nodes, demonstrations against several of those nodes

Some of those actions the PRC claims to have discontinued or never implemented, but we have only the word of PRC government officials on that, or the word of company managers desperate to have access to the PRC domestic market.

It isn’t credible that the august publishers and news writers and commentators really haven’t recognized this, even as they cite examples from the long standing cold war. The news writer at the above link mentioned a couple in passing:

• data, call logs, and other information it [PRC] gathered from years of intrusions into computer networks at US ports, water utilities, airports, and other targets
• PRC acknowledgment of a series of cyber assaults on US infrastructure

The question, then, is why these members of the press have insisted on turning a blind eye toward this cold war of some duration, “worrying” about it only since President Donald Trump (R) has begun fighting back.