Category Archives: defense policy

A Long-Standing Error

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President Joe Biden (D) seems to have identified a long-standing error regarding our nation’s response to espionage.

President Biden’s decision…to punish Russia for the SolarWinds hack broke with years of US foreign policy that has tolerated cyber espionage as an acceptable form of 21st century spycraft[.]

Espionage is espionage, spycraft is spycraft; the tools used are irrelevant to these simple facts.

Congressman Jim Langevin (D, RI) is continuing the misapprehension, though.

The SolarWinds incident that the administration today attributed to the SVR has had all the trappings of traditional espionage that, while unfortunate, has not historically been outside the bounds of responsible state behavior…. Mr Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken should “explain the contours of their new policy,” Mr Langevin said.

Not so much. While the SVR’s activity was, perhaps, not outside the bounds, neither was Biden’s response on this occasion a “new policy” so much as it may be the beginning of a correction of an erroneous policy. Most nations jail domestic spies and expel foreign spies (often jailing them domestically before expelling them at the ends of their sentences).

Biden is on track to getting this one right, for all that he needs to do more.

A Couple Errors about to be Reversed?

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Here’s one, maybe.

President [Joe, D] Biden on Tuesday announced that all adults will be eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccination by April 19, which is even earlier than the May 1st date that he announced last month.

That pretty tightly coincides with the predicted achievement date the prior administration made months ago and that until very recently Biden and his Progressive-Democrats had derisively pooh-poohed.

Here’s another.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told department employees he may restart border wall construction to plug what he called “gaps” in the current barrier.

OK, that’s only a partial correction that may be in the offing, but still….

Hmm….

The PRC, American Business, and Decoupling

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Matt Pottinger, former President Donald Trump’s Deputy White House National Security Adviser, had a number of thoughts concerning the People’s Republic of China, and its targeting of American businesses, with unusual bluntness.

Beijing’s message is unmistakable: you must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.
Another notable element of Beijing’s approach is its explicit goal of making the world permanently dependent on China, and exploiting that dependency for political ends.

RTWT.

What also drew my eye is this, near the end of his op-ed, in response to a PRC strawman that the US was working on decoupling our economy from the PRC’s.

No one in Washington is seriously threatening a wholesale decoupling of the two economies.

That’s sadly true, regardless of the fact that Pottinger, with that sentence, was setting aside the PRC’s nonsensical claim. Pottinger did suggest that we are decoupling in key technologies, but I think that’s inadequate.

Washington—and private enterprise—should be moving apace to decouple from the People’s Republic of China. Not just in “key technologies,” too, but all across our economy, from strategic minerals, through those key technologies, to ordinary consumer products, components, and raw materials.

It’s a wide world, and we have no need to trade with our enemies, much less one who’s clearly stated goal is to conquer us and that wide world.

One More Last Chance

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Britain, France, and Germany decided Thursday not to present a resolution censuring Iran that they had floated to other International Atomic Energy Agency member states earlier in the week. Iran had warned the move could lead it to further curtail international inspections of the country and dissuade it from engaging in direct talks with the US on its nuclear program.

This meek surrender is being masqueraded as a renewing effort.

The US and European powers are giving Iran a last chance to start cooperating with a United Nations atomic agency probe of Tehran’s nuclear activities, backing away from a formal censure of Iran in a bid to revive nuclear diplomacy between Washington and Tehran.
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The decision was backed by Washington, senior diplomats said, reflecting US concerns that renewed pressure on Iran could derail diplomacy.

We’ll mean it next time, guys.

Nah. No we won’t.

Wrong Move

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On a related note now Congress wants in on the action.

A pair of US senators, a Democrat and a Republican [Tim Kaine, D, VA, and Todd Young, R, IN], have moved to strip President Biden of the power to unilaterally use military force.
The move comes after Biden used decades-old authorizations to “stretch his war powers” when he launched his first airstrike in Syria without congressional approval.

This would be a mistake, and Kaine illustrates a part of its nature.

Congress has a responsibility to not only vote to authorize new military action, but to repeal old authorizations that are no longer necessary.

Not at all. Congress has sole authority to declare war, not to authorize “new military action,” and Congress has the sole power to fund continuing military action. The President has the sole responsibility, and authority, to respond to imminent threats to the United States, including with “new military action.”

Related to this, Congressman Jimmy Panetta (D, CA) led a letter, cosigned by some 30 Representatives, to President Joe Biden, in which he said, in part,

While any president would presumably consult with advisors before ordering a nuclear attack, there is no requirement to do so. The military is obligated to carry out the order if they assess it is legal under the laws of war. Under the current posture of US nuclear forces, that attack would happen in minutes.

This illustrates another aspect of the mistake. It’s too often necessary to decide and execute within those minutes; there’s too often no time for consultations—not with missiles only 20 minutes away from impacting on our cities and military installations, and with even less time to a high altitude detonation or series of detonations for a nuclear-originated EMP strike.

Which emphasizes another aspect of the need for prompt decision-making rather than accepting the delays of contacting legislative-mandated consultants and the dithering in which a committee of those consultants would engage. That is the need, for our nation’s security, to carry out a preemptive attack. Today’s technology, and especially tomorrow’s, compress reaction time to the point that often it’s non-existent, and proaction—preemption—is necessary for national survival.

It would be a serious degradation to our national security to degrade a President’s war powers capacity. And, given Article II of our Constitution, such an effort easily could become unconstitutional.