A Clear Demonstration

Michigan’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed, in the name of the State of Michigan, a deal with Gotion Inc, a subsidiary of Gotion High Tech Co Ltd which is headquartered in the People’s Republic of China. Gotion Hi Tech is not only subject to PRC national security law that requires domestic companies to provide information the intelligence community “requests” in whatever nation that information might reside, it has open and direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. From that, Gotion Inc, the party to that Whitmer deal, has those same ties and PRC-legal obligations.

The problem is this. The Gotion-Whitmer deal is for a Gotion battery factory to be built at least in part in the Michigan township of Green Charter. Green Charter has demurred from being used for that deal, and in response, Gotion has filed suit…against Green Charter. Chuck Thelen, Gotion’s Vice President Gotion Global, North America Manufacturing Center:

It’s unfortunate that Gotion has had to resort to litigation to get the township to comply with their obligations under the agreement[.]

This, despite that Gotion’s beef is with Michigan and the Governor’s Office as the signatories of the overall agreement, which presumed to commit the Township to it. Green Charter isn’t the jurisdiction with any contractual obligations here.

It’s true enough that a prior Township board of supervisors had negotiated an agreement with Gotion, but that was done against the will of the Township residents. They ran a recall that tossed every one of those board members and installed a board amenable to the requirements of its collective bosses, those residents. That move rendered the prior agreement nonexistent.

This is a clear, dispositive demonstration, then, of the People’s Republic of China’s cultural mindset and that of Gotion’s managers. Government is in charge and subjects must obey. 一切都在國家之內,沒有什麼是國家之外的,也沒有什麼是反對國家的. Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State (hat tip to Benito Mussolini, who originated the maxim).

This is Why

None of the Gaza Strip is secure until all of it is secure. Israel’s IDF had to go back into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and re-clear it, months after it had done so the first time early in its response to Hamas’ war of extermination that it had begun against Israel.

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said that

senior Hamas militants had re-entered the hospital and were using it to direct attacks against Israel.

Even this time, the IDF was at pains to warn the civilians present that an operation was imminent and they should leave, and they were at equal pains to protect the patients and their doctors who could not leave.

Further,

The raid on the hospital shows how Hamas militants have, according to the Israeli military, returned to places that had already been cleared by Israeli troops in northern Gaza, posing a challenge for Israel even as its forces continue operations it says are aimed at rooting out the group in the south.

This also is an illustration of one of the outcomes stemming from the difficulty of and failure to completely destroy the terrorists’ tunnel system.

Again: none of the Gaza Strip is secure until all of it is secure, and all of Hamas is destroyed. This is why Israel must enter Rafah, and Khirbat al-Adas, and Al Qarya as Suwaydiya, and al Bayuk, and all of the rest of the area in southern Gaza Strip not yet cleared of the terrorists, even for a first time.

This is what Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is actively trying to prevent Israel from achieving with his constant demands for Israel to agree a ceasefire with the Hamas terrorists. Any ceasefire that eases pressure on the terrorists will only facilitate their effort and ability to regroup and refit. Hamas’ ability to regroup and refit in a previously cleared facility in Gaza City while under fire in an active war amply demonstrates this.

Biden isn’t the Only One

On the matter of the Republic of China’s ability to defeat a People’s Republic of China invasion, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden isn’t the only US President who’s been terrified of offending the PRC too badly. The RoC has long sought to buy offensive, and long-range weapons from the US, even concluding some deals that a variety of US administrations have failed to deliver on. Instead, in the main,

[f]or more than a decade, US officials have encouraged Taiwan to invest in small, relatively cheap weapons such as shoulder-fired missiles, drones, and sea mines. The goal would be to bring a Chinese amphibious invasion force to a halt at close range with thousands of small strikes.
Such asymmetrical warfare is a favorite tactic of guerrillas and weaker nations facing big rivals.

I-Chung Lai, an ex-government foreign-affairs official, has the right of it:

The asymmetrical approach advocated by some people would put the whole of Taiwan into a meat grinder[.]

Defensive weaponry optimized for asymmetrical warfare are, indeed, critical items for a small nation’s ability to defend against a large nation’s invasion.

But. But, but, but. Defense only permanently surrenders the tactical and strategic initiative and is ultimate defeat. A much better defense is a strong offense. The RoC needs those far reaching and offensive weapons in order to have a serious chance of defeating—not merely resisting—a PRC invasion, and to do so without turning the fight into a bloody morass that bleeds the Republic dry while only injuring the invader.

The RoC desperately needs those offensive weapons as well as the defensive ones, and the Biden administration has an excellent opportunity to learn the lessons of Ukraine and kowtowing to Putin’s threats by slow-walking and outright withholding the long-range and offensive weapons Ukraine has needed for the last 2+ years. The Biden administration needs to put an end to the pattern of multiple administrations kowtowing to the PRC’s threats and send to the RoC the long-range and offensive weapons, along with the defensive weapons. it needs actually to defeat a PRC invasion attempt.

There is legitimate concern that the RoC can’t afford both the offensive and defensive weapons, or the offensive weapons in useful numbers. That’s what lend-lease programs and outright loans are for.

Trump Wasn’t the First

Since NATO’s creation, the European nations have, in the main, been shirking their obligations to the alliance and with that betraying their fellow alliance members. Then-President Jack Kennedy (D) was among the first American government officials to grow tired of that shirking and to object to it out loud.

John F Kennedy in 1963 told his National Security Council that “we cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share.”

Then it was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1981 in front of the Munich Security Conference:

[T]he United States cannot be expected to improve and strengthen US forces in Europe, unless other allies increase their own contribution to the combined defense effort.

With the end of the Cold War almost 35 years ago,

NATO asserts that almost half its members won’t spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a decade after the alliance affirmed that baseline expectation.

But those were just a bunch of polite noises.

Nor is Trump the only one objecting to European NATO members’ sloth and perfidy today, although today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are standing silently on the sidelines in a reversal (repudiation?) of their Democrat predecessors.

[I]ncreasingly prominent voices in the US think “the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet,” as Senator JD Vance (R, OH) put it recently.

Trump still is right, and it’s been his sharp rhetoric as opposed to those 50 years of “pretty please” that has gotten more NATO members—but not all of them, shamefully—to start honoring their fiscal and equipment commitments to NATO.

US Is Even More Vulnerable

The mostly unfettered inflow of “refugees” from—pick a source, but mostly the Middle East—into Europe is beginning to awaken Europe’s western and central nations to the terrorist risk they face from that flow (eastern Europe’s nations have long been well aware). That relatively uninhibited flow, with its sample that have been caught, should be clanging alarm bells for us, too.

Authorities in Europe say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.

Threats from terrorists, I’ll say, since The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities are too timid to call the spade a spade. Examples of those terrorists’ plots—those that have been discovered—abound.

German and Dutch investigators…arrested four people for allegedly receiving the order from Hamas to open a secret cache of weapons and attack Jewish targets in Berlin and elsewhere in Western Europe.
German prosecutors said Hamas had buried the weapons underground in Europe years ago but that the suspects, all longstanding Hamas members involved in the group’s overseas operations, wouldn’t reveal where.
Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects’ mobile phones….

And

…arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas. Both churches fill with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.

And

Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, designated as a terror group by the US and the European Union. The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, the Italian National Police said.

And on and on. That bit about pre-caching weapons for later retrieval and use is especially troubling, or should be, for us in the US and for our government. Europe doesn’t seem to be getting the large inflow of PRC military-age single men that we are, although Russia’s penchant for exporting little green men for sabotage and battlespace shaping is well enough known, as is the difficulty of detecting them before they go operational. Among those PRC young men flowing so freely into our nation could well be PLA special forces operators; an outcome of the PLA’s broad and rapid buildup, including its special operations units.

Nor can we in our nation say how many Iranian/Iranian-backed terrorists have come in over our borders, unchecked, unhindered in any way, perhaps at a time of their choosing to link up with the weapons other illegal aliens have secreted for them.

This is the risk—in spades—that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is creating for us with his deliberately opened borders policy and the associated wholly unfettered flood of illegal aliens. It’s the risk from the upwards of 1.5 million illegal aliens coming in every year whose entry would be codified in the shameful Border Insecurity bill which the Senate enacted.