Category Archives: defense policy

Biden’s Timidity on International Display

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President Joe Biden’s (D) timidity before Russian President Vladimir Putin is illustrated internationally by his embassy moves.

Recall that when Putin invaded Ukraine and threatened Kyiv, Biden ordered his American embassy to cut and run relocate west to Lviv. When Lviv came under air attack, Biden ordered his American embassy to quit Ukraine altogether and run off relocate to Poland.

Recall further that the Prime Ministers of Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovenia, along with the EU’s President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola—while Kyiv still was under threat of Russian capture—visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. Biden, on the other hand, even though he went to Europe while Kyiv was under siege—to Brussels and later to Rzeszow, Poland—was too timid to travel to Kyiv and meet with Zelenskyy on Zelenskyy’s (besieged) home ground.

It gets worse.

Now that the barbarian has withdrawn from the vicinity of Kyiv and Ukrainian forces have retaken and are consolidating national control over much of northern Ukraine [emphasis added]

Turkey…became the first major nation to send diplomats back to Kyiv….
Turkey’s embassy, which had relocated to the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi [never leaving Ukraine], reopened in Kyiv and will resume consular services, it said on social media. The US, by contrast, currently doesn’t have any diplomatic presence on Ukrainian soil, with embassy staff operating from Poland.

Even with Kyiv safe from Russian occupation, Biden has no intention of having his State Department move his embassy back to Kyiv. Biden has no intention of visiting with Zelenskyy in the latter’s Presidential Office Building, or even of sending his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or CJCS General Mark Milley to meet with the leaders of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, whose offices also are in the Presidential Office Building.

The Biden-Harris administration is an utter embarrassment to our nation.

The Barbarian on His Redeployment

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is redeploying some of his forces away from the vicinity of Kyiv. He’s also ordering his hordes to lay booby traps that would do Daesh proud.  Per Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (as cited by The Wall Street Journal):

[R]etreating Russian forces had placed mines in houses, laid trip wires and booby-trapped corpses.

And this:

The [Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv] city council said a confectionery factory in Bucha had been mined by the Russian military before it departed.

Never mind the lack of military importance of this sort of installation. Certainly, sugar can be used to make a variety of bombs, but to the extent that’s the case, the militarily appropriate act would have been simply to destroy the factory. This was done solely to inflict more civilian casualties.

And at a private residence in Velyka Dymerka, a village just northeast of Kyiv, a returning resident filmed the damage done by Russians:

In a kennel outside, his dog lay dead, apparently shot. “Why would you kill it?”

Because barbarism.

NATO Member Nations’ “Commitment”

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gotten NATO members to step up their military budgets. Or so is the hopeful assessment of those member nation governments’…claims.

NATO members outside the US are set to boost their military spending following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to alliance Secretary-General [and former Norway Prime Minister] Jens Stoltenberg and pledges from member countries.

However [emphasis added].

Only eight countries, including the US, already cross the 2% threshold, according to NATO’s report, a decline from the previous annual report, in which 11 countries met the target.

And

The percentages are subject to changes in both defense budgets and to economic activity, which has been buffeted by the coronavirus pandemic over the past two years.

Indeed. There’s always an excuse for walking away from an inconvenient commitment.

Stoltenberg, as cited by The Wall Street Journal, said:

…it is hard for governments to allocate more money for defense. “But when we see a new security reality, we all realize the need to invest in our security,” he said.

No, it’s not hard at all. Either the nations’ governments honor their commitments to defend each other, either the nations’ governments honor their obligation to defend their own people (which is enhanced—or would be—by that mutual defense commitment), or they do not. The only hard part is finding the moral courage actually to do what they say they will do. The rest is just allocation of monies.

On that note, this:

But Germany and other countries that fall short have recently announced new plans to increase military spending following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Germany is a prime example of this. During the Trump administration, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to increase Germany’s military spending to 2% of GDP or more, and thereby honor Germany’s commitment to that 2% threshold—a commitment Germany had been dishonoring since the NATO-wide commitment’s inception in 2014. Then Germany continued to dishonor its commitment under Merkel: the budget she submitted next after her commitment to Trump welched anew; her budget allocated less than 1.6% of GDP to Germany’s military.

Now Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz has made the Merkel commitment, but there’s no reason to believe he has any more intention than Merkel had of honoring the promise.

Those other 20+ countries who’ve been dishonoring their commitments all along? Sure. Italy already has walked away again; the others likely will simply be quiet about their continued decision to not spend on military needs.

There’s always an excuse.

War, Inflation, and Biden’s Energy “Policy”

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President Joe Biden (D), having had his nose rubbed in the criticality of fossil fuels to our economy and those of all nations around the world by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s frequent use of oil and natural gas exports as weapons, now is begging other nations and consortia to produce more oil. And he’s insisting that our own oil and gas producers do more to produce while castigating them for being responsible for the present high and continuing inflation rates us Americans are experiencing.

An anonymous White House spokeswoman:

Mr Biden “wants to do everything possible and sensible to mitigate” the affect of high energy prices on American families.
“He’s been clear in recent remarks that oil and gas companies should help ensure that oil supply meets demand, and at the same time we need to advance clean energy options and decrease our reliance on fossil fuels[.]”

This is disingenuous, though. Biden and his advisors know full well that oil and gas producers cannot just turn on the wells and turn them off at will. It costs time and money to cap the wells in a safe, environmentally protective manner, and it costs time and money to uncap them in a safe, environmentally protective manner. It costs time and money to protect pipelines from the pressure reductions associated with significant production decreases, and it costs time and money to protect pipelines from the pressure increases associated with significant production increases. It costs time and money to reschedule and reallocate rail cars for oil transport.

It especially costs time and money to dig new wells, frack new wells, and lay additional pipelines to handle the increased production. That transport brings me to refineries—these cost time and money to to close and to open in order to handle refining decreases and increases. Natural gas-to-liquid natural gas facilities are even more expensive to close and reopen, and require even more money than simple refineries to build more of, which we need to do since we don’t have enough here, and potential customer nations don’t have enough of at the receiving end.

The time and cost problems don’t end there. It takes time—years—to recoup those costs, which run to billions of dollars per year. And yet, the current Progressive-Democrat political environment is one of zealously anti-fossil fuels regulation, drilling blockages, pipeline blockages.

Oil and gas producers are understandably and justifiably chary of spending that time and money to alter their production schedules. They can’t trust the Progressive-Democrats to let them produce long enough to recoup all those costs.

There’s just no reason to believe Biden and his advisors are serious about oil and gas or of high energy prices or of inflation generally.

Senator Rick Scott Has a Plan

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No, in this article, I’m not referring to his 11 Point Plan to Rescue America; I’m writing about his urging American businesses to divest themselves of their investments and other business connections inside the People’s Republic of China.

Earlier this month, I wrote an open letter to American business leaders with a simple message: it’s time to cut ties with and decouple our supply chains from Communist China to realign US business with American values.

He went on.

We need a strategic economic decoupling from Communist China—that includes ending investment and partnerships with companies controlled by the CCP. This is something I have been calling for over a year. While decoupling must begin now, we know it’s not a process that will be completed overnight. Supply chains must readjust and be removed from the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party.

Scott is absolutely right. The PRC is an enemy nation, and business—any economic—ties with the nation are fraught with danger, not only for the individual business—the intellectual property and technology thefts Scott references—but for our national security—those intellectual property and technology thefts along with defense and diplomacy-related espionage and technology thefts. Every nation carries out such espionage, but that espionage by the PRC is strongly facilitated by the nature of the business ties PRC laws impose on companies doing business in, or with businesses in, the PRC.

What needs to be understood here, though, and I’m not sure even Scott fully understands the matter, is that every business in the PRC is under the thumb of the Communist Party of China. The PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law makes them so: every PRC company must answer all of that nation’s intelligence community requests for information regarding the company’s internal affairs, the company’s business dealings with other businesses, and the company’s information gleaned from its customers, whether individual or business. And if the company doesn’t have that information, it’s required to try to get it.