Category Archives: defense policy

Russia’s West Surrender Security Guarantees

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Russia has laid out its latest demand for security guarantees.

  • No North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion further eastward to include Ukraine
  • abandon all NATO military activities in all of Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia
  • no deployment of additional NATO troops and weapons outside the countries in which they were before any Eastern bloc nations joined the alliance in May 1997
  • each side should refrain from deploying intermediate and shorter-range missiles where they can hit the territory of the other side
  • not use territory of another state to carry out an armed attack against one another

Will Russia remove its theater nuclear weapons and its conventional weapons from Kaliningrad? Of course not.

Will Russia remove its military forces to east of the Urals? Of course not.

Will Russia withdraw from Crimea and eastern Ukraine? Of course not.

There’s nothing mutual about these guarantees; they’re more a Security of Russia Guarantee, while leaving Russia a free hand in moving west.

Russia’s demands should be a non-starter and not even discussed except for a one-word statement: “No.” In fact, these demands should be answered with an offer to Ukraine to join NATO.

But this is the Biden-Harris administration, and Germany has far too much influence in NATO.

BDS Comes to the White House

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Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions have come to the Biden-Harris Presidency.

The US has rejected a request from Israel to speed up the delivery of pre-ordered KC-46 refueling jets, amid escalating tensions between the country and neighboring Iran.

Those modern tankers would greatly extend the reach and endurance of Israel’s combat aircraft, a capability increasingly needed for Israel’s own defense as Iran progresses inexorably toward obtaining nuclear weapons.

The denial, though, is a measure of how desperate Biden-Harris is to get from the kiddie table to a nuclear weapons deal with Iran. He doesn’t want to risk offending Khamenei by facilitating Israel’s ability to defend itself.

Invading Ukraine is a Trap for Putin?

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That’s the thesis Christopher Hartwell has in his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed. And he made a good case: Russia failed in a similar situation in Afghanistan; the “brother Slav” argument that Putin makes for Ukrainians coming into the Russian fold isn’t all that; the Ukrainians would mount a strong guerrilla war after losing the invasion war, making the total cost too high for a fragile Russian economy to survive. He concludes with this:

Russia can’t be an empire without Ukraine. But Russia will cease to be a great power if it tries to acquire the rest of Ukraine.

Hartwell, however, ignored a couple of key points, along with made a false comparison.

The false comparison is that of Ukraine and Afghanistan. There was far more enmity, especially fueled by culture and fundamentalist religion, between Afghans and Russians than exists between Ukrainians and Russians, for all the current “brother Slav” split.

Afghan geography lent itself far more effectively to guerrilla resistance than does Ukrainian territory.

The matter of experience: the Red Army, now Russian Ground Forces, gained quite a lot of experience at fighting against a guerrilla foe in Afghanistan, and those forces now are real-time combat experienced at prosecuting a guerrilla war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They’re conversant with both sides of the guerrilla question. They’re also gaining currency as an occupation force in Crimea.

The key points are these: regardless of how easy or hard it might be for Putin to conquer Ukraine (which conquering will be the easier for Biden-Harris’ refusal to arm Ukraine even with defensive weapons, much less offensive ones), Putin in the end will have Ukraine under his at least more-or-less control, and in the process, he will have completely denied Ukraine to the rest of Europe.

The other key point will be his success at humiliating Biden-Harris, adding to the Biden-Harris administration’s own destructive effects on American credibility. That alone is worth a pretty kopek in Putin’s geopolitical calculation.

Maybe an invasion wouldn’t be such a trap.

A PRC Anschluss

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Here is one Critical Item in Xi Jinping’s rationale for conquering the Republic of China and occupying the island of Taiwan. At the 19th Party Congress, in October 2017, Xi was quite blunt:

People on both sides of the strait are one family, with shared blood…. No one can ever cut the veins that connect us.

It doesn’t matter that the citizens of the RoC are proud to be of the RoC and not of the PRC.

No one can ever cut the veins that connect us. Sound familiar?

Where else are there significant Chinese-heritage populations? Here are the 15 sovereign nations with the largest such:

  • Thailand
  • Malaysia
  • Indonesia
  • Singapore
  • Canada
  • Myanmar
  • Philippines
  • Australia
  • South Korea
  • Japan
  • Vietnam
  • France
  • United Kingdom
  • Venezuela

All of these nations are under pressure of one form or another to, at the least, not interfere with PRC interests, and in many cases to accede to them. Will that be sufficient for Xi? It matters not a single minim that these populations are proud, loyal citizens of those nations: their blood is mainland Chinese, and no one can ever cut the veins that connect [them].

And the United States, with the third largest Chinese-heritage population—entirely loyal to and proud, successful citizens of the US, but also with, according to Xi, those inseverable blood ties to mainland China. The PRC is working hard to develop and deploy a world-spanning first strike capability for its PLA.

Dangerous Misunderstanding

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JCS Chairman General Mark Milley has a very serious and dangerous misunderstanding. He said, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal,

China’s investment in its navy, hypersonic missiles, cyber, and other technologies are designed to ensure that it, along with Russia and the US, are world-leading nations.

This is a man who isn’t paying attention to what’s going on around him. The People’s Republic of China’s investments, along with its foreign policy initiatives, are not at all concerned with enabling the PRC to operate on an equal footing with us and with Russia.

The PRC’s moves are centered solely on that nation being the sole world power, with Russia as its sidekick and our nation subordinated to its bidding.

See, for instance, the PRC-Russia agreement allowing the PRC to exploit Siberian mineral, timber, and other resources. In executing this agreement, the PRC is allowed to colonize move hundreds of thousands of PRC workers into south central and eastern Siberia to carry out the exploitation, and then it will share some of the produce with Russia.

The PRC’s navy, hypersonic missiles, cyber, and other investments, many of which are coming to fruition, are intended to give the PRC a first-strike military capability so overwhelming that no second-strike response would even be possible.