Category Archives: defense policy

There’s Debt, and There’s Debt

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James Jay Carafano speculated on the lessons People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping is learning from Russia President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. One of those lessons is the coming cost of bailing out Putin’s economy, should he win, lose, or draw in Ukraine, and should Xi choose to do a bailout.

Beijing’s buddy in Moscow is going to be an economic basket case. Even if Beijing wants to bail them out with their patent debt trap, that is going to cost a lot of money—likely more than the Chinese Communist Party can spare. Buying up Russia at fire-sale prices might be more than even Xi can manage.

Not necessarily. The People’s Republic of China and generations of the state of China before it have considered (Russian) Siberia to have been stolen from the Chinese. A few short years ago, Putin and Xi concluded an economic deal that has Russia and the PRC jointly exploiting eastern and southern Siberia’s vast resources, both on the ground (timber) and below it (ores, oil, natural gas, among others), with the vast bulk of the labor being Chinese, and with that Chinese labor (and their families) moving into Siberia to live and do the work.

One way to do the bailout, with its re-formed means of debt repayment, would be to alter the exploitation deal in the PRC’s favor. Sharply alter it.

A Strategic Blunder

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Or not. In his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Tunku Varadarajan cited the historian Robert Service as saying that two immense strategic blunders caused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The first supposed blunder is illustrative of how far our…intellectuals…have deviated from reason and morality.

The first [immense strategic blunder] came on November 10, when the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, which asserted America’s support for Kyiv’s right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

No.

It’s never a blunder, large or small, to do a right thing, and acknowledging a sovereign nation’s right to pursue its own friendly, peaceful, or defensive ends always is a right thing. Beyond that, the right time to do a right thing always is right away.

If there was an immense strategic blunder, it was President Joe Biden’s (D) thinking he could virtue-signal with petty ink on a piece of paper and not actually have to back up those words with concrete support for Ukraine.

Full stop.

Dangerously Hypocritical

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And dangerous in its own right. President Joe Biden (D), even as he pays lip service to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of that nation, is conspiring with Russia to let Iran obtain nuclear weapons. Here’s Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst and ex-senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council:

The US has partnered with Russia to get a new nuclear deal with Iran. This includes secret talks with the Russians over the last year and agreements where Russia would hold uranium enriched by Iran and give it back to Iran if a future Republican president backed out of a new nuclear deal.

This is dangerously hypocritical in that Biden is conspiring with one enemy nation to free up another enemy nation in the latter’s effort to get nuclear weapons. The agreement that Biden is so desperate to get back into (with its trivial tweaks) expires, ends sanctions against Iran, and with that expiry leaves Iran with an unrestricted path to nuclear weapons.

Biden’s dealings with Russia in this are dangerous in their own right because Russia is going to give that enriched uranium back to Iran under any circumstance—that uranium is a threat to us and to Israel, and that’s what Russia wants. This is how desperate Biden is to prevent a subsequent President—especially a hated Republican President—from canceling his precious deal: he knows Russia will give the uranium back.

In the end, any agreement Biden might enter into here becomes hard for future Presidents to undo only if Biden submits the deal to Congress for majority votes in each house, which would make the deal a statute, or he submits it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Absent those, all Biden’s agreement becomes is an Executive Agreement, which can be undone with the stroke of a pen—just as former President Donald Trump (R) did with the prior failure of an Obama Executive Agreement.

And a future President should cancel such an EA without hesitation, given that Russian return of uranium.

The West is Getting Serious

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Or so claims The Wall Street Journal‘s Gerard Baker. He spent 850 words touting the price Russian President Vladimir Putin will pay for his overrunning and destruction of Ukraine. Baker closed his paeon to Western earnestness with these two paragraphs:

But the price for him—crippling economic sanctions, Europe and North America in a rare show of unity, the strengthening of NATO, and the weakening of the pro-Russian forces in the West—will be high.
If we draw the right lesson, the biggest price he may pay is a renewed appreciation in the West of what our civilization has achieved—and a renewed determination to defend and nourish it.

And yet, having paid that price, Putin still will have Ukraine. How serious is the West, really, if it’s seriously considering accepting the vig it’s charging Putin for his conquering Ukraine, and calling the exchange a job well done?

How serious is the West in defending itself, really, if it continues to be satisfied with merely charging a price for Russian—and other tyrannies’—encroachment?

His Own Brothers and Sisters

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Russian President Vladimir Putin now seems intent on simply killing them. Putin’s clearly stated rationale for invading Ukraine is that Ukrainians and Russians are the same people and the area of Ukraine should be part of Russia.

Now, since his attempt at blitzing Ukraine and overrunning that nation has stalled, Putin has changed tactics.

Russian forces bombarded the center of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and warned of further strikes against the capital, Kyiv, as Moscow, frustrated in its plans for a quick victory, switched to a new strategy of pummeling civilian areas in an attempt to demoralize Ukrainian resistance.

And

On Monday, Russian forces unleashed a barrage of multiple-launch rocket fire against residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, killing at least 10 civilians, including three children and their parents who were incinerated in a car struck by a Russian projectile, and injuring at least 40, according to Kharkiv officials.

Starvation or total destruction seems to be the purpose of the 40-mile long train of Russian soldiers and weapons moving to encircle Kyiv, also.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has the right of it:

A missile targeting the central square of a city [Kharkiv, for one] is open, undisguised terrorism[.] It’s terrorism that aims to break us, to break our resistance.

Putin’s own brothers and sisters, his own nieces and nephews.